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— AND 




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* e -^- CAUSES 

AND 

CONSEQUENCES 



BY 



JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 

AUTHOR OF EMERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS 



DEDICA TED 

TO THE 

MEMBERS OF CLUB C 



Copies of the twenty-five cent edition of Causes and 
Consequences can be obtained by remitting 
twenty-five cents to Chambers Printing Com- 
pany, 24-34 New Chambers Street, New York. 






CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I. Politics . 3 

II. Society 49 

III. Education; Froebei, S3 

IV. Democracy 115 

V. Government 137 



Gift 

Dr. John M- Gitterman 

March 6 2 934 



Copyright, 1808 
By Charles vScribner's Sons 



PREFACE 

As we unravel political knots, they resolve 
themselves into proverbs and familiar truth, 
and thus our explanation becomes a treatise 
upon human nature, — a profession of faith. 
The idea chat man is an unselfish animal 
has gradually been forced upon me, by the 
course of reflection which I give in the fol- 
lowing chapters, in the order in which it oc 
curred to me. The chapters are little more 
than presentations from different points of 
view of this one idea. The chapters on 
Politics and Society seem to show that our 
political corruptions and social inferiorities 
can be traced to the same source, — namely, 
temporary distortion of human character by 
the forces of commerce. The chapter on 
Education is a study on the law of intellect- 
ual growth, and shows that a normal and 
rounded development can only come from a 
use of the faculties very different from that 
practised by the average American since the 
discovery of the cotton gin. 



PREFACE 

The chapter on Democracy is a review of 
that subject by the light of the conclusions as 
to the Nature of Man, arrived at in the Essay 
on Education ; and it is seen that our frame 
of government is in accord with sound phi- 
losophy, and is a constant influence tending 
to correct the distortions described in the 
first two chapters. In the final chapter on 
Government, some illustrations are drawn 
together, showing that the whole course of 
reasoning of the book contains nothing novel, 
but accords with the ideals and with the 
wisdom of the world. 

The book itself arose out of an attempt to 
explain an election. 

J. J. c. 

Rokeby, June 10, 1898. 



via 



POLITICS 






POLITICS 

Misgovernment in the United States is an 
incident in the history of commerce. It is 
part of the triumph of industrial progress. 
Its details are easier to understand if studied 
as a part of the commercial development of 
the country than if studied as a part of gov- 
ernment, because many of the wheels and 
cranks in the complex machinery of govern- 
ment are now performing functions so per- 
verted as to be unmeaning from the point of 
view of political theory, but which become 
perfectly plain if looked at from the point of 
view of trade. 

The growth and concentration of capital 
which the railroad and the telegraph made 
possible is the salient fact in the history of 
the last quarter-century. That fact is at the 
bottom of our political troubles. It was in- 
evitable that the enormous masses of wealth, 
springing out of new conditions and requir- 
ing new laws, should strive to control the 
3 



POLITICS 

legislation and the administration which 
touched them at every point. At the pres- 
ent time, we cannot say just what changes 
were or were not required by enlightened 
theory. It is enough to see that such 
changes as came were inevitable ; and noth- 
ing can blind us to the fact that the methods 
by which they were obtained were subversive 
of free government. 

Whatever form of government had been in 
force in America during this era would have 
run the risk of being controlled by capital, 
of being bought and run for revenue. It 
happened that the beginning of the period 
found the machinery of our government in a 
particularly purchasable state. The war had 
left the people divided into two parties which 
were fanatically hostile to each other. The 
people were party mad. Party name and 
party symbols were of an almost religious 
importance. 

At the very moment when the enthusiasm 
of the nation had been exhausted in a heroic 
war which left the Republican party-manag- 
ers in possession of the ark of the covenant, 
the best intellect of the country was with- 
drawn from public affairs and devoted to 
trade. During the period of expansion which 
followed, the industrial forces called in the 
^4 



POLITICS 

ablest men of the nation to aid them in get- 
ting control of the machinery of government. 
The name of king was never freighted with 
more power than the name of party in the 
United States; whatever was done in that 
name was right. It is the old story : there 
has never been a despotism which did not 
rest upon superstition. The same spirit 
that made the Republican name all power- 
ful in the nation at large made the Demo- 
cratic name valuable in Democratic districts. 
The situation as it existed was made to 
the hand of trade. Political power had by 
the war been condensed and packed for de- 
livery; and in the natural course of things 
the political trademarks began to find their 
way into the coffers of the capitalist. The 
change of motive power behind the party 
organizations — from principles, to money — 
was silently effected during the thirty years 
which followed the war. Like all organic 
change, it was unconscious. It was under- 
stood by no one. It is recorded only in a 
few names and phrases ; as, for instance, that 
part of the organization which was purchased 
was called the "machine," and the general 
manager of it became known as the "boss/' 
The external political history of the country 
continued as before. It is true that a steady 
5 



POLITICS 

degradation was to be seen in public life, a 
steady failure of character, a steady decline 
of decency. But questions continued to be 
discussed, and in form decided, on their 
merits, because it was in the interest of 
commerce that they should in form be so 
decided. Only quite recently has the con- 
trol of money become complete ; and there are 
reasons for believing that the climax is past. 

Let us take a look at the change on a 
small scale. A railroad is to be run through 
a country town or small city, in New York 
or Pennsylvania. The railroad employs a 
local attorney, naturally the ablest attorney 
in the place. As time goes on, various 
permits for street uses are needed; and 
instead of relying solely upon popular de- 
mand, the attorney finds it easier to bribe 
the proper officials. All goes well : the rail- 
road thrives, the town grows. But in the 
course of a year new permits of various 
kinds are needed. The town ordinances in- 
terfere with the road and require amend- 
ment. There is to be a town election; and 
it occurs to the railroad's attorney that he 
might be in alliance with the town officers 
before they are elected. He goes to the 
managers of the party which is likely to 
6 



POLITICS 

win; for instance, the Republican party. 
Everything that the railroad wants is really 
called for by the economic needs of the 
town. The railroad wants only fair play 
and no factious obstruction. The attorney 
talks to the Republican leader, and has a 
chance to look over the list of candidates, 
and perhaps even to select some of them. 
The railroad makes the largest campaign 
subscription ever made in that part of the 
country. The Republican leader can now 
employ more workers to man the polls, and, 
if necessary, he can buy votes. He must 
also retain some fraction of the contribution 
for his own support, and distribute the rest 
in such manner as will best keep his " or- 
ganization " together. 

The party wins, and the rights of the rail- 
road are secured for a year. It is true that 
the brother of the Republican leader is em- 
ployed on the road as a brakeman; but he is 
a competent man. 

During the year, a very nice point of law 
arises as to the rights of the railroad to 
certain valuable land claimed by the town. 
The city attorney is an able man, and rea- 
sonable. In spite of his ability, he manages 
somehow to state the city's case on an un- 
tenable ground. A decision follows in favor 
7 



POLITICS 

of the railroad. At the following election, 
the city attorney has become the Republi- 
can candidate for judge, and the railroad's 
campaign subscription is trebled. In the 
conduct of railroads, even under the best 
management, accidents are common; and 
while it is true that important decisions are 
appealable, a trial judge has enormous powers 
which are practically discretionary. Mean- 
while, there have arisen questions of local 
taxation of the railroad's property, questions 
as to grade crossings, as to the lighting of 
cars, as to time schedules, and the like. 
The court calendars are becoming crowded 
with railroad business ; and that business is 
now more than one attorney can attend to. 
In fact, the half dozen local lawyers of 
prominence are railroad men; the rest of 
the lawyers would like to be. Every one 
of the railroad lawyers receives deferential 
treatment, and, when possible, legal advan- 
tage in all of the public offices. The com- 
munity is now in the control of a ring, held 
together by just one thing, the railroad com- 
pany's subscription to the campaign fund. 

By this time a serious scandal has occurred 

in the town, — nothing less than the rumor 

of a deficit in the town treasurer's accounts, 

and the citizens are concerned about it. One 

8 



POLITICS 

of the railroad's lawyers, a strong party man, 
happens to be occupying the post of district 
attorney; for the yearly campaign subscrip- 
tions continue. This district attorney is, 
in fact, one of the committee on nomina- 
tions who put the town treasurer into office; 
and the Republican party is responsible for 
both. No prosecution follows. The dis- 
trict attorney stands for re-election. 

An outsider comes to live in the town. 
He wants to reform things, and proceeds to 
talk politics. He is not so inexperienced 
as to seek aid from the rich and respectable 
classes. He knows that the men who sub- 
scribed to the railroad's stock are the same 
men who own the local bank, and that the 
manufacturers and other business men of the 
place rely on the bank for carrying on their 
business. He knows that all trades which 
are specially touched by the law, such as 
the liquor-dealers' and hotel-keepers', must 
" stand in" with the administration; so also 
must the small shopkeepers, and those who 
have to do with sidewalk privileges and 
town ordinances generally. The newcomer 
talks to the leading hardware merchant, a 
man of stainless reputation, who admits that 
the district attorney has been remiss; but 
the merchant is a Republican, and says that 
9 



POLITICS 

so long as he lives he will vote for the party 
that saved the country. To vote for a Dem- 
ocrat is a crime. The reformer next ap- 
proaches the druggist (whose father-in-law 
is in the employ of the railroad), and re- 
ceives the same reply. He goes to the flor- 
ist. But the florist owns a piece of real 
estate, and has a theory that it is assessed 
too high. The time for revising the assess- 
ment rolls is coming near, and he has to see 
the authorities about that. The florist agrees 
that the town is a den of thieves; but he 
must live; he has no time to go into theo- 
retical politics. The stranger next inter- 
views a retired grocer. But the grocer has 
lent money to his nephew, who is in the 
coal business, and is getting special rates 
from the railroad, and is paying off the debt 
rapidly. The grocer would be willing to 
help, but his name must not be used. 

It is needless to multiply instances of 
what every one knows. After canvassing 
the whole community, the stranger finds five 
persons who are willing to work to defeat 
the district attorney: a young doctor of 
good education and small practice, a young 
lawyer who thinks he can make use of the 
movement by betraying it, a retired anti- 
slavery preacher, a maiden lady, and a piano- 
10 



POLITICS 

tuner. The district attorney is re-elected by 
an overwhelming vote. 

All this time the railroad desires only a 
quiet life. It takes no interest in politics. 
It is making money, and does not want 
values disturbed. It is conservative. 

In the following year worse things hap- 
pen. The town treasurer steals more money, 
and the district attorney is openly accused 
of sharing the profits. The Democrats are 
shouting for reform, and declare that they 
will run the strongest man in town for dis- 
trict attorney. He is a Democrat, but one 
who fought for the Union. He is no longer 
in active practice, and is, on the whole, the 
most distinguished citizen of the place. 
This suggestion is popular. The hardware 
merchant declares that he will vote the 
Democratic ticket, and there is a sensation. 
It appears that during all these years there 
has been a Democratic organization in the 
town, and that the notorious corruption of 
the Republicans makes a Democratic victory 
possible. The railroad company therefore 
goes to the manager of the Democratic party, 
and explains that it wants only to be let 
alone. It explains that it takes no interest 
in politics, but that, if a change is to come, 
it desires only that So-and-So shall be re- 

XI 



POLITICS 

tained, and it leaves a subscription with the 
Democratic manager. In short, it makes 
the best terms it can. The Democratic 
leader, if he thinks that he can make a clean 
sweep, may nominate the distinguished citi- 
zen, together with a group of his own organ- 
ization comrades. It obviously would be of 
no use to him to name a full citizens' ticket. 
That would be treason to his party. If he 
takes this course and wins, we shall have 
ring rule of a slightly milder type. The 
course begins anew, under a Democratic 
name; and it may be several years before 
another malfeasance occurs. 

But the Republican leader and the rail- 
road company do not want war; they want 
peace. They may agree to make it worth 
while for the Democrats not to run the dis- 
tinguished citizen. A few Democrats are 
let into the Republican ring. They are 
promised certain minor appointive offices, 
and some contracts and emoluments. Ac- 
cordingly, the Democrats do not nominate 
the distinguished citizen. The hardware 
man sees little choice between the two nom- 
inees for district attorney; at any rate, he 
will not vote for a machine Democrat, and 
he again votes for his party nominee. 
All the reform talk simmers down to 

12 






POLITICS 

silence. The Republicans are returned to 
power. 

The town is now ruled by a Happy Fam- 
ily. Stable equilibrium has been reached 
at last. Commercialism is in control. Hence- 
forth, the railroad company pays the bills for 
keeping up both party organizations, and it 
receives care and protection from whichever 
side is nominally in power. 

The party leaders have by this time be- 
come the general utility men of the railroad; 
they are its agents and factotums. The boss 
is the handy man of the capitalist. So long 
as the people of the town are content to vote 
on party lines they cannot get away from the 
railroad. In fact, there are no national par- 
ties in the town. A man may talk about 
them, but he cannot vote for one of them, 
because they do not exist. He can vote 
only for or against the railroad; and to do 
the latter, an independent ticket must be 
nominated. 

It must not be imagined that any part of 
the general public clearly understands this 
situation. The state of mind of the Better 
Element of the Republican side has been 
seen. The good Democrats are equally dis- 
tressed. The distinguished citizen ardently 
desires to oust the Republican ring. He 
13 



POLITICS 

subscribes year after year to the campaign 
fund of his own party, and declares that the 
defalcation of the town treasurer has given 
it the opportunity of a generation. The 
Democratic organization takes his money 
and accepts his moral support, and uses it to 
build up one end of the machine. It cries, 
11 Reform ! Reform ! Give us back the prin- 
ciples of Jefferson and of Tilden ! " 

The Boss-out-of-Power must welcome all 
popular movements. He must sometimes 
accept a candidate from a citizens' commit- 
tee, sometimes refuse to do so. He must 
spread his mainsail to the national party 
wind of the moment. His immense advan- 
tage is an intellectual one. He alone knows 
the principles of the game. He alone sees 
that the power of the bosses comes from 
party loyalty. Croker recently stated his 
case frankly thus: "A man who would de- 
sert his party would desert his country. " 

It may be remarked, in passing, that New 
York city reached the Happy Family stage 
many years ago. Tammany Hall is in 
power, being maintained there by the great 
mercantile interests. The Republican party 
is out of power, and its organization is kept 
going by the same interests. It has always 
been the ear-mark of an enterprise of the 
14 



POLITICS 

first financial magnitude in New York that 
it subscribed to both campaign funds. The 
Republican function has been to prevent any 
one from disturbing Tammany Hall. This 
has not been difficult; the Republicans have 
always been in a hopeless minority, and the* 
machine managers have understood this per- 
fectly. Now if, by the simple plan of de- 
nouncing Tammany Hall, and appealing to 
the war record of the Republican party, they 
could minimize the independent vote and hold 
their own constituency, Tammany would be 
safe. The matter is actually more complex 
than this, but the principle is obvious. 

To return to our country town. It is easy 
to see that the railroad is pouring out its 
money in the systematic corruption of the 
entire community. Even the offices with 
which it has no contact will be affected by 
this corruption. Men put in office because 
they are tools will work as tools only. 
Voters once bribed will thereafter vote for 
money only. The subscribing and the vot- 
ing classes, whose state of mind is outlined 
above, are not purely mercenary. The re- 
tired grocer, the florist, the druggist, are all 
influenced by mixed motives, in which per- 
sonal interest bears a greater or a smaller 
share. Each of these men belongs to a 
party, as a Brahmin is born into a caste. 
x 5 



POLITICS 

His spirit must suffer an agony of conver- 
sion before he can get free, even if he is 
poor. If he has property, he^must pay for 
that conversion by the loss of money, also. 

Since 1865 the towns throughout the 
United States have been passing through 
this stage. A ring was likely to spring up 
wherever there was available capital. We 
hear a great talk about the failure of our in- 
stitutions as applied to cities, as if it were 
our incapacity to deal with masses of peo- 
ple and with the problems of city expansion 
that wrecked us. It is nothing of the sort. 
There is intellect and business capacity 
enough in the country to run the Chinese 
Empire like clockwork. Philosophers state 
broadly that our people " prefer to live in 
towns," and cite the rush to the cities dur- 
ing the last thirty years. The truth is that 
the exploitation of the continent could be 
done most conveniently by the assembling 
of business men in towns; and hence it is 
that the worst rings are found in the larger 
cities. But there are rings everywhere; and 
wherever you see one you will find a factory 
behind it. If the population had remained 
scattered, commerce would have pursued 
substantially the same course. We should 
have had the rings just the same. It is per- 
16 



POLITICS 

fectly true that the wonderful and scientific 
concentration of business that we have seen 
in the past thirty years gave the chance for 
the wonderful and scientific concentration of 
its control over politics. The state machine j 
could be constructed easily, by consolidating! 
local rings of the same party name. 

The boss par excellence is a state boss. He 
is a comparatively recent development. He 
could exist only in a society which had long 
been preparing for him. He could operate 
only in a society where almost every class 
and almost every individual was in a certain 
sense corrupted. The exact moment of his 
omnipotence in the State of New York, for 
instance, was recorded by the actions of the 
State legislature. Less than ten years ago, 
the bribing of the legislature was done piece- 
meal and at Albany; and the great corpora- 
tions of the State were accustomed to keep 
separate attorneys in the capitol, ready for 
any emergency. But the economy of hav- 
ing the legislature corrupted before election 
soon became apparent. If the party organ- 
izations could furnish a man with whom the 
corporation managers could contract directly, t 
they and their directors could sleep at night. 
The state boss sprang into existence to meet 
z 17 



POLITICS 

this need. He is a commercial agent, like his 
little local prototype ; but the scope of his 
activities is so great and their directions are 
so various, the forces that he deals with are 
so complex and his mastery over them is so 
complete, that a kind of mystery envelops 
him. He appears in the newspapers like a 
demon of unaccountable power. He is the 
man who gives his attention to aiding in the 
election of the candidates for state office, 
and to retaining his hold upon them after 
election. His knowledge of local politics 
all over a State, and the handling of the very 
large sums of money subscribed by sundry 
promoters and corporations, explain the mir- 
acle of his control. 

The government of a State is no more than 
a town government over a wide area. The 
methods of bribery which work certain gen- 
eral results in a town will work similar re- 
sults in a State. But the scale of operations 
is vastly greater. The State-controlled busi- 
nesses, such as banking, insurance, and the 
State public works, and the liquor traffic, in- 
volve the expenditure of enormous sums of 
money. 

The effect of commercialism on politics is 
best seen in the state System. The manner 
of nominating candidates shows how easily 
18 



POLITICS 

the major force in a community makes use 
of its old customs. 

The American plan of party government 
provides for primaries, caucuses, and town, 
county, and State conventions. It was de- 
vised on political principles, and was in- 
tended to be a means of working out the 
will of the majority, by a gradual delegation 
of power from bottom to top. The exigen- 
cies of commerce rea A uired that this machin- 
ery should be made to work backwards, — 
namely, from top to bottom. It was abso- 
lutely necessary for commerce to have a 
political dictator; and this was found to be 
perfectly easy. Every form and process of 
nomination is gravely gone through with, 
the dictator merely standing by and desig- 
nating the officers and committee-men at 
every step. There is something positively 
Egyptian in the formalism that has been 
kept up in practice, and in the state of mind 
of men who are satisfied with the procedure. 

The men who, in the course of a party 
convention, are doing this marching and 
countermarching, this forming and dissolv- 
ing into committees and delegations, and 
who appear like acolytes going through mys- 
tical rites and ceremonies, are only self- 
seeking men, without a real political idea 
19 



POLITICS 

in their heads. Their evolutions are done 
to be seen by the masses of the people, who 
will give them party support if these forms 
are complied with. 

We all know well another interesting per- 
version of function. A legislator is by polit- 
ical theory a wise, enlightened man, pledged 
to intellectual duties. He gives no bonds. 
He is responsible only under the Constitu- 
tion and to his own conscience. Therefore, 
if the place is to be filled by a dummy, 
almost anybody will do. A town clerk must 
be a competent man, even under boss rule; 
but a legislator will serve the need so long 
as he is able to say "ay" and "no." The 
boss, then, governs the largest and the most 
complex business enterprise in the State; 
and he is always a man of capacity. He is 
obliged to conduct it in a cumbersome and 
antiquated manner, and to proceed at every 
step according to precedent and by a series 
of fictions. When we consider that the 
legislators and governors are, after all, not 
absolute dummies; that among them are 
ambitious and rapacious men, with here and 
there an enemy or a traitor to the boss and 
to his patrons, we see that the boss must be 
well equipped with the intellect of intrigue. 
And remember this: he must keep both 

2Q 



POLITICS 

himself and his patrons out of jail, and so 
far as possible keep them clear of public 
reprobation. 

We have not as yet had any national boss, 
because the necessity for owning Congress 
has not as yet become continuous ; and the in- 
terests which have bought the national legis- 
lature at one time or another have done it by 
bribing individuals, in the old-fashioned way. 

Turning now to New York city, we find 
the political situation very similar to that of 
the country town already described. The in- 
terests which actually control the businesses 
of the city are managed by very few individ- 
uals. It is only that the sums involved are 
different. One of these men is president 
of an insurance company whose assets are 
$130,000,000; another is president of a sys- 
tem of street railways with a capital stock of 
$30,000,000; another is president of an ele- 
vated road system with a capital of the same 
amount ; a fourth is vice-president of a pav- 
ing company worth $10,000,000; a fifth owns 
$50,000,000 worth of real estate; a sixth 
controls a great railroad system ; a seventh 
is president of a savings-bank in which 
$5,000,000 are deposited; and so on. The 
commercial ties which bind the community 
together are as close in the city as in the 

21 



POLITICS 

country town. The great magnates live in 
palaces, and the lesser ones in palaces, also. 
The hardware-dealer of the small town is in 
New York the owner of iron-works, a man 
of stainless reputation. The florist is the 
owner of a large tract of land within the city 
limits, through which a boulevard is about 
to be cut. The retired merchant has be- 
come a partner of his nephew, and is devel- 
oping one of the suburbs by means of an 
extension of an electric road system. But 
the commercial hierarchy does not stop here; 
it continues radiating, spreading downward. 
All businesses are united by the instruments 
and usages which the genius of trade has de- 
vised. All these interests together repre- 
sent the railroad of the country town. They 
take no real interest in politics, and they 
desire only to be let alone. 

For the twenty years before the Strong 
administration the government of the city 
was almost continuously under the control 
of a ring, or, accurately speaking, of a Happy 
Family. Special circumstances made this 
ring well nigh indestructible. The Boss- 
out-of-Power of the Happy Family happens 
to be also the boss of the State legislature. 
He performs a double function. This is 
what has given Piatt his extraordinary power. 

22 



POLITICS 

It will have been noticed that some of the 
masses of wealth above mentioned are pe- 
culiarly subject to State legislation : they 
subscribe directly to the State boss's fund. 
Some are subject to interference from the 
city administration: they subscribe to the 
city boss's fund. 

We see that by the receipt of his fund the 
State boss is rendered independent of the 
people of the city. He can use the State 
legislature to strengthen his hands in his 
dealings with the city boss. After all, he 
does not need many votes. He can buy 
enough votes to hold his minority together 
and keep Tammany safely in power, and by 
now and then taking a candidate from the 
citizens he advertises himself as a friend of 
reform. 

As to the Tammany branch of the con- 
cern, the big money interests need specific 
and often illegal advantages, and pay heav- 
ily over the Tammany counter. But as we 
saw before, public officers, if once corrupted, 
will work only for money. Every business 
that has to do with one or another of the 
city offices must therefore now contribute 
for "protection. " A foreign business that 
is started in this city subscribes to Tam- 
many Hall as a visitor writes his name in 
23 



POLITICS 

a book at a watering-place. It gives him 
the run of the town. In the same way, the 
State-fearing business man subscribes to 
Piatt for "protection." No secret is made 
of these conditions. The business man re- 
gards the reformer as a monomaniac who is 
not reasonable enough to see the necessity 
for his tribute. In the conduct of any large 
business, this form of bribery is as regular 
an item as rent. The machinery for such 
bribery is perfected. It is only when some 
blundering attempt is made by a corporation 
to do the bribing itself, when some unbusi- 
nesslike attempt is made to get rid of the 
middleman, that the matter is discovered. 
A few boodle aldermen go to jail, and every 
one is scandalized. The city and county 
officers of the new city of New York will 
have to do with the disbursing of $70,000,000 
annually, — ■ fully one half of it in the con- 
duct of administration. The power of these 
officers to affect or even control values, by 
manipulation of one sort or another, is fa- 
miliar to us all from experience in the past. 

So much for business. Let us look at the 
law. The most lucrative practice is that of 
an attorney who protects great corporate in- 
terests among these breakers. He needs 
H 



POLITICS 

but one client ; he gets hundreds. The mind 
of the average lawyer makes the same uncon- 
scious allowance for bribery as that of the 
business man. Moreover, we cannot over- 
look the cases of simple old-fashioned brib- 
ery to which the masses of capital give rise. 
In a political emergency any amount of 
money is forthcoming immediately, and it is 
given from aggregations of capital so large 
that the items are easily concealed in the 
accounts. Bribery, in one form or another, 
is part of the unwritten law. It is atmos- 
pheric ; it is felt by no one. The most able 
men in the community believe that society 
would drop to pieces without bribery. They 
do not express it in this way, but they act 
upon the principle in an emergency. A 
leader of the bar, at the behest of his Wall 
Street clients, begs the reform police board 
not to remove Inspector Byrnes, who is the 
Jonathan Wild of the period. The bench is 
fairly able. But many of the judges on the 
bench have paid large campaign assessments 
in return for their nominations; others have 
given notes to the bosses. This reveals the 
exact condition of things. In a corrupt era 
the judges pay cash. Now they help their 
friends. The son or the son-in-law of a 
judge is sure of a good practice, and referees 
2 5 



POLITICS 

are appointed from lists which are largely 
dictated by the professional politicians of 
both parties. 

It would require an encyclopaedia to state 
the various simple devices by which the 
same principle runs through every depart- 
ment in the life of the community. Such 
an encyclopaedia for New York city would 
be the best picture of municipal misgovern- 
ment in the United States during the com- 
mercial era. But one main fact must again 
be noted : this great complex ring is held 
together by the two campaign funds, the 
Tammany Hall fund and the Republican 
fund. They are the two power houses which 
run all this machinery. 

So far as human suffering goes, the posi- 
tive evils of the system fall largely on the 
poor. The rich buy immunity, but the poor 
are persecuted, and have no escape. This 
has always been the case under a tyranny. 
What else could we expect in New York? 
The Lexow investigation showed us the con- 
dition of the police force. The lower courts, 
both criminal and civil, and the police de- 
partment were used for vote-getting and for 
money-getting purposes. They were serv- 
ing as instruments of extortion and of fa- 
voritism. But in the old police courts the 
26 



POLITICS 

foreigner and the honest poor were actually 
attacked. Process was issued against them, 
their business was destroyed, and they were 
jailed unless they could buy off. This sys- 
tem still exists to some extent in the lower 
civil courts. 

It is obvious that all these things come to 
pass through the fault of no one in particu- 
lar. We have to-day reached the point where 
the public is beginning to understand that 
the iniquity is accomplished by means of the 
political boss. Every one is therefore abus- 
ing the boss. But Piatt and Croker are not 
worse than the men who continue to employ 
them after understanding their function. 
These men stand for the conservative moral- 
ity of New York, and for standards but little 
lower than the present standards. 

Let us now see how those standards came 
to exist. Imagine a community in which, 
for more than a generation, the government 
has been completely under boss rule, so that 
the system has become part of the habits and 
of the thought of the people, and consider 
what views we might expect to find in the 
hearts of the citizens of such a community. 
The masses will have been controlled by 
what is really bribery and terrorism, but 
what appears in the form of a very plausible 
27 



POLITICS 

appeal to the individual on the ground of 
self-interest. For forty years money and 
place have been corrupting them. Their 
whole conception of politics is that it is a 
matter of money and of place. The well-to- 
do will have been apt to prosper in propor- 
tion as they have made themselves serviceable 
to the dominant powers, and have become part 
and parcel of the machinery of the system. 
It is not to be pretended that every man in 
such a community is a rascal, but it is true 
that in so far as his business brings him into 
contact with the administrative officers every 
man will be put to the choice between lucra- 
tive malpractice and thankless honesty. A 
conviction will spread throughout the com- 
munity that nothing can be done without a 
friend at court ; that honesty does not pay, 
and probably never has paid in the history 
of the world ; that a boss is part of the 
mechanism by which God governs mankind; 
that property would not be safe without him ; 
and, finally, that the recognized bosses are 
not so bad as they are painted. The great 
masses of corporate property have owners 
who really believe that the system of gov- 
ernment which enabled them to make money 
is the only safe government. These people 
cling to abuses as to a life-preserver. They 
28 



POLITICS 

fear that an honest police board will not be 
able to bribe the thieves not to steal from 
them, that an honest State insurance depart- 
ment will not be able to prevent the legis- 
lature from pillaging them. It is absolutely 
certain that in the first struggles for re- 
form the weight of the mercantile classes 
will be thrown very largely on the side of 
conservatism. 

Now, in a great city like New York the 
mercantile bourgeoisie will include almost 
every one who has an income of five thou- 
sand dollars a year, or more. These men 
can be touched by the bosses, and therefore, 
after forty years of tyranny, it is not to be 
expected that many of those who wear black 
coats will have much enthusiasm for reform. 
It is " impracticable ; " it is " discredited ; " 
it is "expensive; " it is "advocated by un- 
known men;" it speaks ill of the "respect- 
able; " it "does harm " by exciting the poor 
against the rich; it is "unbusinesslike" and 
"visionary;" it is "self-righteous." We 
have accordingly had, in New York city, a 
low and perverted moral tone, an incapacity 
to think clearly or to tell the truth when we 
know it. This is both the cause and the 
consequence of bondage. A generation of 
men really believe that honesty is bad pol- 
29 



POLITICS 

icy, and continue to be governed by Tam- 
many Hall. 

The world has wondered that New York 
could not get rid of its famous incubus. 
The gross evils as they existed at the time 
of Tweed are remembered. The great im- 
provements are not generally known. Re- 
form has been slow, because its leaders have 
not seen that their work was purely educa- 
tional. They did not understand the polit- 
ical combination, and they kept striking at 
Tammany Hall. Like a child with a toy, 
they did not see that the same mechanism 
which caused Punch to strike caused Judy's 
face to disappear from the window. 

It is not selfishness and treason that are 
mainly responsible for the discredit which 
dogs "reform." It is the inefficiency of up- 
right and patriotic men. The practical diffi- 
culty with reform movements in New York 
has been that the leaders of such movements 
have clung to old political methods. These 
men have thought that if they could hire or 
imitate the regular party machinery, they 
could make it work for good. They would 
fight banditti with bravi. They would expel 
Tammany Hall, and lo, Tammany is within 
them. 

3o 



POLITICS 

Is it a failure of intellect or of morality 
which prevents the reformers from seeing 
that idealism is the shortest road to their 
goal ? It is the failure of both. It is a leg- 
acy of the old tyranny. In one sense it is 
corruption; in another it is stupidity; in 
every sense it is incompetence. Political 
incompetence is only another name for moral 
degradation, and both exist in New York 
for the same reason that they exist in Tur- 
key. They are the offspring of blackmail. 

Well-meaning and public-spirited men, 
who have been engrossed in business for the 
best part of their lives, are perhaps excus- 
able for not understanding the principles on 
which reform moves. Any one can see that 
if what was wanted was merely a good school 
board, the easiest way to get it would be to 
go to Croker, give him a hundred thousand 
dollars, and offer to let him alone if he gave 
the good board. But until very recently 
nobody could see that putting good school 
commissioners on Piatt's ticket and giving 
Piatt the hundred thousand dollars was pre- 
cisely the same thing. 

In an enterprise whose sole aim is to raise 

the moral standard, idealism always pays. 

A reverse following a fight for principle, like 

the defeat of Low, is pure gain. It records 

3 1 



POLITICS 

the exact state of the cause. It educates the 
masses on a gigantic scale. The results of 
that education are immediately visible. 

On the other hand, all compromise means 
delay. By compromise, the awakened faith 
of the people is sold to the politicians for a 
mess of reform. The failures and mistakes 
of Mayor Strong's administration were among 
the causes for Mr. Low's defeat. People 
said, " If this be reform, give us Tammany 
Hall." Our reformers have always been in 
hot haste to get results. They want a bal- 
ance-sheet at the end of every year. They 
think this will encourage the people. But 
the people recall only their mistakes. The 
long line of reform leaders in New York city 
are remembered with contempt. The evil 
that men do lives after them; the good is 
oft interred with their bones. 

That weakness of intellect which makes 
reformers love quick returns is twin brother 
to a certain defect of character. Personal 
vanity is very natural in men who figure as 
tribunes of the people. They say, " Look at 
Abraham Lincoln, and how he led the people 
out of the wilderness; let us go no faster 
than the people in pushing these reforms; 
let us accept half-measures ; let us be Abra- 
ham Lincoln." The example of Lincoln has 
3* 



POLITICS 

wrecked many a promising young man ; for 
really Lincoln has no more to do with the 
case than Julius Caesar. As soon as the 
reformers give up trying to be statesmen, 
and perceive that their own function is 
purely educational, and that they are mere 
anti-slavery agitators and persons of no ac- 
count whatever, they will succeed better. 

As to the methods of work in reform, — 
whether it shall be by clubs or by pam- 
phlets, by caucus or by constitution, — they 
will be developed. Executive capacity is 
simply that capacity which is always found 
in people who really want something done. 

In New York, the problem is not to oust 
Tammany Hall; another would arise in a 
year. It is to make the great public under- 
stand the boss system, of which Tammany 
is only a part. As fast as the reformers see 
that clearly themselves, they will find the 
right machinery to do the work in hand. It 
may be that, like the Jews, we shall have to 
spend forty years more in the wilderness, 
until the entire generation that lived under 
Pharaoh has perished. But education nowa- 
days marches quickly. The progress that 
has been made during the last seven years 
in the city of New York gives hope that 
3 33 



POLITICS 

within a decade a majority of the voters will 
understand clearly that all the bosses are in 
league. 

In 1890, this fact was so little understood 
by the managers of an anti-Tammany move- 
ment which sprang up in that year that, after 
raising a certain stir and outcry, they put 
in the field a ticket made up exclusively of 
political hacks, whose election would have 
left matters exactly where they stood. The 
people at large, led by the soundest political 
instinct, re-elected Tammany Hall, and gave 
to sham reform the rebuff it deserved. In 
1894, after the Lexow investigation had kept 
the town at fever-heat of indignation all 
summer, Mayor Strong was nominated by 
the Committee of Seventy, under an arrange- 
ment with Piatt. The excitement was so 
great that the people at large did not exam- 
ine Mr. Strong's credentials. He was a 
Republican merchant, and in no way iden- 
tified with the boss system. Mayor Strong's 
administration has been a distinct advance, 
in many ways encouraging. Its errors and 
weaknesses have been so clearly traceable to 
the system which helped elect him that it 
has been in the highest degree valuable as 
an object-lesson. In 1895, only one year 
after Mayor Strong's election, the fruits of 
34 



POLITICS 

his administration could not yet be seen. 
In that year a few judges and minor local 
officers were to be chosen. By this time the 
"citizens' movement " had become a regular 
part of a municipal election. A group of 
radicals, the legatees of the Strong cam- 
paign, had for a year been enrolled in clubs 
called Good Government Clubs. These men 
took the novel course of nominating a com- 
plete ticket of their own. This was con- 
sidered a dangerous move by the moderate 
reformers, who were headed by the Chamber 
of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce 
and its well-meaning supporters then took a 
step which, from an educational standpoint, 
turned out to be most important. In their 
terror lest Tammany Hall should gain the 
prestige of a by-election, they made an ar- 
rangement with Piatt, and were allowed to 
name some candidates on his ticket. This 
was the famous "fusion," which the Good 
Government men attacked with as much 
energy as they might have expended on 
Tammany Hall. A furious campaign of 
crimination between the two reform fac- 
tions followed, and of course Tammany was 
elected. 

The difference between the Good Govern- 
ment men (the Goo-Goos, as they were 
35 



POLITICS 

called) and the Fusionists was entirely one 
of political education. The Goo-Goo mind 
had advanced to the point of seeing that 
Piatt was a confederate of Tammany and 
represented one wing of the great machine. 
To give him money was useless; to lend 
him respectability was infamous. These 
ideas were disseminated by the press; and 
it was immaterial that they were dissemi- 
nated in the form of denunciations of the 
Good Government Clubs. The people at 
large began to comprehend clearly what they 
had always instinctively believed. There 
was now a nucleus of men in the town who 
preferred Tammany Hall to any victory that 
would discredit reform. 

It may be noted that the Good Govern- 
ment Clubs polled less than one per cent of 
the vote cast in that election; and that in 
the recent mayoralty campaign the Citizens' 
Union ran Mr. Low on the Good Govern- 
ment platform, and polled 150,000 votes. 
In this same election, the straight Republi- 
can ticket, headed by Tracy, polled 100,000 
votes, and Tammany polled about as many 
as both its opponents together. A total of 
about 40,000 votes were cast for George and 
other candidates. 

Much surprise has been expressed that 

-36 



POLITICS 

there should be 100,000 Republicans in New 
York whose loyalty to the party made them 
vote a straight ticket with the certainty of 
electing Tammany Hall ; but in truth, when 
we consider the history of the city, we ought 
rather to be surprised at the great size of the 
vote for Mr. Low. He was the man who 
arranged the fusion of 1895. It was entirely 
due to a lack of clear thinking and of politi- 
cal courage that such an arrangement was 
then made. Two years ago the Chamber of 
Commerce did not clearly understand the 
evils that it was fighting. Is it a wonder 
that 100,000 individual voters are still back- 
ward in their education ? If we discount the 
appeal of self-interest, which determined 
many of them, there are probably some 
75,000 Republicans whose misguided party 
loyalty obscured their view and deadened 
their feelings. They cannot be said to hate 
bad government very much. They do not 
think Tammany Hall so very bad, after all. 
As the London papers said, the dog has 
returned to his vomit. It is unintelligent 
to abuse them. They are the children of 
the age. A few years ago we were all such 
as they. Of Mr. Low's 150,000 supporters, 
on the other hand, there are probably at 
least 40,000 who would, vote through thick 
37 



POLITICS 

and thin for the principles which his cam- 
paign stood for. 

Any one who is a little removed by time 
or by distance from New York knows that 
the city cannot have permanent good govern- 
ment until a clear majority of our 500,000 
voters shall develop what the economists 
call an "effective desire" for it. It is not 
enough merely to want reform. The major- 
ity must know how to get it. For educa- 
tional purposes, the intelligent discussion 
throughout the recent campaign is worth all 
the effort that it cost. The Low campaign 
was notable in another particular. The 
banking and the mercantile classes sub- 
scribed liberally to the citizens' campaign 
fund. They are the men who have had the 
most accurate knowledge of the boss system, 
because they support it. At last they have 
dared to expose it. Indeed, there was a rent 
in Wall Street. The great capitalists and 
the promoters backed Tammany and Piatt, 
as a matter of course; but many individuals 
of power and importance in the street came 
out strongly for Low. They acted at per- 
sonal risk, with courage, out of conscience. 
The great pendulum of wealth has swung 
toward decency. It is very difficult to use 
this or any money in the cause of reform 

38 



POLITICS 

without doing more harm than good. But 
the money is not the main point; the per- 
sonal influence of the men who give it 
operates more powerfully than the money. 
Hereafter reform will be respectable. The 
professional classes are pouring into it. The 
young men are re-entering politics. Its victory 
is absolutely certain, and will not be distant. 

The effect of public-spirited activity on 
the character is very rapid. Here again we 
cannot separate the cause from the conse- 
quence; but it is certain that the moral tone 
of the community is changing very rapidly 
for the better, and that the thousands of men 
who are at this moment preparing to take 
part in the next citizens' campaign, and who 
count public activity as one of the regular 
occupations of their lives, are affecting the 
social and commercial life of New York. 
The young men who are working to reform 
politics find in it not only the satisfaction of 
a religious instinct, but an excitement which 
business cannot provide. 

One effect of the commercial supremacy 
has been to make social life intolerably dull, 
by dividing people into cliques and trade 
unions. The millionaire dines with the 
millionaire, the artist with the artist, the 
39 



POLITICS 

hat-maker with the hat-maker, gentlefolk 
with gentlefolk. All of these sets are 
equally uninspiring, equally frightened at 
a strange face. The hierarchy of commerce 
is dull. The intelligent people in America 
are dull, because they have no contact, no 
social experience. Their intelligence is a 
clique and wears a badge. They think they 
are not affected by the commercialism of 
the times; but their attitude of mind is pre- 
cisely that of a lettered class living under a 
tyranny. They flock by themselves. It is 
certain that the cure for class feeling is 
public activity. The young jeweller, the 
young printer, and the golf-player, each, 
after a campaign in which they have been 
fighting for a principle, finds that social 
enjoyment lies in working with people un- 
like himself, for a common object. Reform 
movements bring men into touch, into 
struggle with the powers that are really 
shaping our destinies, and show them the 
sinews and bones of the social organism. 
The absurd social prejudices which unman 
the rich and the poor alike vanish in a six 
weeks' campaign. Indeed, the exhilaration 
of real life is too much for many of the 
reformers. Even bankers neglect their busi- 
ness, and dare not meet their partners, and 
40 



POLITICS 

a dim thought crosses their minds that per- 
haps the most enlightened way to spend 
money is, not to make it, but to invest their 
energies directly in life. 

The reasons for believing that the boss 
system has reached its climax are manifold. 
Some of them have been stated, others may 
be noted. In the first place, the railroads are 
built Business is growing more settled. The 
sacking of the country's natural resources 
goes on at a slower pace. It is a matter of 
history, that economic laws did so operate, 
that the New York Central Railroad controlled 
the State legislature during the period of the 
building and consolidation of the many small 
roads which make up the present great system. 
But the conditions have changed. Bribery, 
like any other crime, may be explained by 
an emergency; but everyone believes that 
bribery is not a permanent necessity in the 
running of a railroad, and this general belief 
will determine the practices of the future. 
Public opinion will not stand the abuses; and 
without the abuse where is the profit ? In 
many places, the old system of bribery is 
still being continued out of habit, and at a 
loss. The corporations can get what they 
4i 



POLITICS 

want more cheaply by legal methods, and 
they are discovering this. In the second 
place, the boss system is now very generally 
understood. The people are no longer de- 
ceived. The ratio between party feeling and 
self-interest is changing rapidly, in the mind 
of the average man. It was the mania of 
party feeling that supported the boss sys- 
tem and rendered political progress impos- 
sible, and party feeling is dying out. We 
have seen, for instance, that those men 
who, by the accident of the war, were shaken 
in their party loyalty, have been the most 
politically intelligent class in the nation. 
The Northern Democrats, who sided with 
their opponents to save the Union, were 
the first men to be weaned of party pre- 
judice, and from their ranks, accordingly, 
came civil service reformers, tariff refor 
mers, etc. ♦ 

It is noteworthy, also, that the Jewish 
mind is active in all reform movements. 
The isolation of the race has saved it from 
party blindness, and has given scope to its 
extraordinary intelligence. The Hebrew 
prophet first put his finger on blackmail as 
the curse of the world, and boldly laid the 
charge at the door of those who profited by 
the abuse. It was the Jew who perceived 
42 



POLITICS 

that, in the nature of things, the rich and 
the powerful in a community will be tram- 
melled up and identified with the evils of the 
times. The wrath of the Hebrew prophets 
and the arraignments of the New Testament 
owe part of their eternal power to their 
recognition of that fact. They record an 
economic law. 

Moreover, time fights for reform. The 
old voters die off, and the young men care 
little about party shibboleths. Hence these 
non partisan movements. Every election, 
local or national, which causes a body of 
men to desert their party is a blow at the 
boss system. These movements multiply 
annually. They are emancipating the small 
towns throughout the Union, even as com- 
merce was once disfranchising them. As 
party feeling dies out in a man's mind, it 
leaves him with a clearer vision. His con- 
science begins to affect his conduct very 
seriously, when he sees that a certain course 
is indefensible. It is from this source that 
the reform will come. 

The voter will see that it is wrong to sup- 
port the subsidized boss, just as the capi- 
talist has already begun to recoil from the 
monster which he created. He sees that it 
is wrong at the very moment when he is 
43 



POLITICS 

beginning to find it unprofitable. The old 
trademark has lost its value. 

The citizens' movement is, then, a purge 
to take the money out of politics. The 
stronger the doses, the quicker the cure. If 
the citizens maintain absolute standards, the 
old parties can regain their popular support 
only by adopting those standards. All citi- 
zens' movements are destined to be tempo- 
rary; they will vanish, to leave our politics 
purified. But the work they do is as broad 
as the nation. 

The question of boss rule is of national 
importance. The future of the country is 
at stake. Until this question is settled, all 
others are in abeyance. The fight against 
money is a fight for permission to decide 
questions on their merits. The last presi- 
dential election furnished an illustration of 
this. At a private meeting of capitalists 
held in New York City, to raise money for 
the McKinley campaign, a very important 
man fervidly declared that he had already 
subscribed $5000 to "buy Indiana," and that 
if called on to do so he would subscribe 
$5000 more! He was greeted with cheers 
for his patriotism. Many of our best citi- 
zens believe not only that money bought 
44 



POLITICS 

that election, but that the money was well 
spent, because it averted a panic. These 
men do not believe in republican institu- 
tions; they have found something better. 

This is precisely the situation in New 
York city. The men who subscribed to 
the McKinley campaign fund are the same 
men who support Tammany Hall. In 1896 
they cried, "We cannot afford Bryan and 
his panic !" In 1897 the same men in New 
York cried, "We cannot afford Low and 
reform ! " That is what was decided in each 
case. Yet it is quite possible that the 
quickest, wisest, and cheapest way of deal- 
ing with Bryan would have been to allow 
him and his panic to come on, — fighting 
them only with arguments, which immediate 
consequences would have driven home very 
forcibly. That is the way to educate the 
masses and fit them for self-government; 
and it is the only way. 

In this last election the people of New 
York have crippled Piatt. It is a service 
done to the nation. Its consequences are as 
yet not understood ; for the public sees only 
the gross fact that Tammany is again in 
power. 

But the election is memorable. It is a 
sign of the times. The grip of commerce 
45 



POLITICS 

is growing weaker, the voice of conscience 
louder. A phase in our history is passing 
away. That phase was predestined from the 
beginning. 

The war did no more than intensify ex- 
isting conditions, both commercial and po- 
litical. It gave sharp outlines to certain 
economic phenomena, and made them dra- 
matic. It is due to the war that we are now 
able to disentangle the threads and do jus- 
tice to the nation. 

The corruption that we used to denounce 
so fiercely and understand so little was a 
phase of the morality of an era which is 
already vanishing. It was as natural as the 
virtue which is replacing it; it will be a 
curiosity almost before we have done study- 
ing it. We see that our institutions were 
particularly susceptible to this disease of 
commercialism, and that the sickness was 
acute, but that it was not mortal. Our in- 
stitutions survived. 



46 



SOCIETY 



II 

SOCIETY 

OUR institutions have survived, the perils 
of boss rule are past, and we may look back 
upon the system with a kind of awe, and 
recognize how easily the system might have 
overthrown our institutions and ushered in 
a period which history would have recorded 
as the age of the State Tyrants. 

Let us imagine that some State like Penn- 
sylvania, on which the boss system had been 
so firmly fixed that a boss was able to be- 
queath his seat in the United States Senate 
to his son, had shown forth an ambitious. 
man, a ruler who realized that his function 
was not one of business, but one of govern- 
ment ; let us imagine that a President of the 
Pennsylvania Railroad, some man of great 
capacity, had undertaken to rule the State. 
He would, by his position as State boss, 
have been able gradually to do away with 
the petty bosses and petty abuses. He 
would give the State a general cities law, 
good schools, clean streets, speedy justice; 
4 49 



SOCIETY 

every necessary municipal improvement. 
Gas, water, boulevards would be supplied 
with an economy positively startling to a 
generation accustomed to jobs. He would 
destroy the middlemen as Louis XL de- 
stroyed the nobles, and give to his State, for 
the first time in the history of the country, 
good government. A benign tyranny, with 
every department in the hands of experts, 
makes the strongest form of government in 
the world. Every class is satisfied. Penn- 
sylvania would have been famous the world 
over. Its inhabitants would have been proud 
of it; foreigners would have written books 
about it; other States would have imitated it. 

Meanwhile the power of self-government 
would have been lost. 

Biennial sessions of the Legislature are 
already a favorite device for minimizing the 
evils of Legislatures. But the dictator 
would have desired to discourage popular 
assemblies. The whole business world 
would have backed the boss, in his plan for 
quinquennial or decennial sessions. Once 
give way to the laziness, once cater to the 
inertia and selfishness of the citizen, and he 
sinks into slumber. 

Our feeble and floundering citizens' move- 
ments in New York during the last ten 
5° 



SOCIETY 

years show us how hard it is to recover the 
power of self-government when once lost; 
how gradual the gain, even under the most 
stimulating conditions of misrule. Given 
thirty years of able administration by a 
single man, and the boss system would have 
sunk so deep into the popular mind, the 
arctic crust of prejudice and incompetence 
would have frozen so deep, that it might 
easily take two hundred years for the com- 
munity to come to life. Recovery could 
only come through the creeping in of abuses, 
through the decentralization of the great 
tyranny. And as each abuse arose, the popu- 
lation would clamor to the dictator and beg 
him to correct it. After a while a few 
thinkers would arise who would see that the 
only way to revive our institutions was by 
the painstaking education of the people. 
The stock in trade of these teachers would 
be the practical abuses, and very often they 
would be obliged to urge upon the people a 
course which would make the abuses tempo- 
rarily more acute. 

We have escaped an age of tyrants, be- 
cause the eyes of the bosses and their mas- 
ters were fixed on money. They were not 
ambitious. Government was an annex to 
trade- To certain people the boss appears 
5 1 



SOCIETY 

as a ruler of men. If proof were needed 
that he is a hired man employed to do the 
dirty work of others, what better proof could 
we have than this: No one of all the hun- 
dreds of bosses thrown up during the last 
thirty years has ever lifted himself out of 
his sphere, or even essayed to rule. 

That devotion of the individual to his 
bank account which created the boss and 
saved us from the dictator must now be 
traced back into business. 

For the sake of analysis it is convenient 
now to separate and again not to separate 
the influences of business proper from the 
influences of dishonesty, but in real life 
they are one thing. Dishonesty is a mere 
result of excessive devotion to money-mak- 
ing. The general and somewhat indefinite 
body of rules which are considered "honest M 
change from time to time. I call a thing 
dishonest when it offends my instinct. The 
next man may call it honest. The question 
is settled by society at large. "What can a 
man do and remain in his club ? " That 
gives the practical standards of a community. 
The devotion of the individual to his bank 
account gives the reason why the financier 
and his agent, the boss, could always find 
5 2 



SOCIETY 

councilmen, legislators, judges, lawyers, to 
be their jackals, or to put the equation with 
the other end first, it is the reason why the 
legislators could always combine to black- 
mail the capitalist: this political corruption 
is a mere spur and offshoot of our business 
corruption. We know more about it, be- 
cause politics cannot be carried on wholly 
in the dark. Business can. The main facts 
are known. Companies organize subsidiary 
companies to which they vote the money of 
the larger company — cheating their stock- 
holders. The railroad men get up small 
roads and sell them to the great roads which 
they control — cheating their stockholders. 
The purchasing agents of many great en- 
terprises cheat the companies as a matter 
of course, not by a recognized system of 
commissions — like French cooks — but by 
stealth. So in trade, you cannot sell goods 
to the retailers, unless you corrupt the proper 
person. It is all politics. All our politics 
is business and our business is politics. 

There is something you want to do, and 
the " practical man " is the man who knows 
the ropes, knows who is the proper person 
to be "seen." The slang word gives a pic- 
ture of the times — to " see " a man means 
to bribe him. 

^53 



SOCIETY 

But let no one think that dishonesty or 
anything else begins at the top. These big 
business men were once little business men. 

To cut rates, to have a different price for 
each customer, to substitute one article for 
another, are the prevailing policies of the 
seller. To give uncollectible notes, to 
claim rebates, to make assignments and 
compromises, to use one shift or another in 
order to get possession of goods and pay less 
than the contract price, are the prevailing 
aims of the buyer. 

It is unquestionably possible for an incor- 
ruptible man to succeed in business. But 
his scruples are an embarrassment. Not 
everybody wants such a man. He insists 
on reducing every reckoning to pounds ster- 
ling, while the rest of the world is figuring 
in maravedis. He must make up in ability 
what he lacks in moral obliquity. 

He will no doubt find his nook in time. 
Honesty is the greatest luxury in the world, 
and the American looks with awe on the 
man who can afford it, or insists upon hav- 
ing it. It is right that he should pay for it. 

The long and short of the matter is that 
the sudden creation of wealth in the United 
States has been too much for our people. 
54 



SOCIETY 

We are personally dishonest. The people 
of the United States are notably and pecu- 
liarly dishonest in financial matters. 

The effect of this on government is but 
one of the forms in which the ruling passion 
is manifest. "What is there in it for me? " 
is the state of mind in which our people 
have been existing. Out of this come the 
popular philosophy, the social life, the archi- 
tecture, the letters, the temper of the age; 
all tinged with the passion. 

Let us look at the popular philosophy of 
the day. An almost ludicrous disbelief that* 
any one can be really disinterested is met at 
once. Any one who takes an intelligent 
interest in public affairs becomes a " re- 
former. " He is liked, if it can be reason- 
ably inferred that he is advancing his own 
interests. Otherwise he is incomprehen- 
sible. He is respected, because it is impos- 
sible not to respect him, but he is regarded 
as a mistaken fellow, a man who interferes 
with things that are not his business, a 
meddler. 

The unspoken religion of all sensible men 
inculcates thrift as the first virtue. Busi- 
ness thunders at the young man, "Thou 
shalt have none other gods but me." Nor 

5.5 



SOCIETY 

is it a weak threat, for business, when it 
speaks, means business. The young doctor 
in the small town who advocates reform loses 
practice for two reasons: first, because it is 
imagined that he is not a serious man, not a 
good doctor, if he gives time to things out- 
side his profession; second, because the car- 
riage-maker does not agree with him and 
regards it as a moral duty to punish him. 
The newsdealer in the Arcade at Rector 
Street lost custom because it was discovered 
that he was a Bryan man. The bankers 
would not buy papers of him. Since the 
days of David, the great luxury of the power- 
ful has been to be free from the annoyance 
of other persons' opinions. The professional 
classes in any community are parasites on 
the moneyed classes; they attend the distri- 
bution. They cannot strike the hand that 
feeds them. In a country where economic 
laws tend to throw the money into the hands 
of a certain type of men, the morality of 
those men is bound to affect society very 
seriously. 

The world-famous "timidity" of Ameri- 
cans in matters of opinion, is the outward 
and visible sign of a mental preoccupation. 
Tocqueville thought it was due to their 
democratic form of government It is not 
56 



SOCIETY 

due to democracy, but to commercial condi- 
tions. In Tocqueville's day it arose out of 
the slavery question, solely because that 
question affected trade. 

In describing the social life of Boston, 
Josiah Quincy says of George Ticknor's 
hospitality: "There seemed to be a cosmo- 
politan spaciousness about his very vesti- 
bule. He received company with great ease, 
and a simple supper was always served to 
his evening visitors. Prescott, Everett, 
Webster, Hi Hard, and other noted Boston- 
ians well mixed with the pick of such 
strangers as happened to be in the city, fur- 
nished a social entertainment of the first 
quality. Politics, at least American poli- 
tics, were never mentioned. " 

It was at such "entertainments " as this 
that the foreign publicists received their 
impressions as to the extinction of free 
speech in America. Politics could not be 
mentioned ; but this was not due to our 
democratic form of government, but to the 
fact that Beacon Street was trading with 
South Carolina. " Politics " meant slavery, 
and Beacon Street could not afford to have 
values disturbed — not even at a dinner 
party. 

. We have seen that our more recent mis- 
57 



SOCIETY 

government has not been due to democracy, 
and we now see that the most striking weak- 
ness of our social life is not and never has 
been due to democracy. 

Let us take an example: A party of men 
meet in a club, and the subject of free trade 
is launched. Each of these men has been 
occupied all day in an avocation where 
silence is golden. Shall he be the one to 
speak first? Who knows but what some 
phase of the discussion may touch his 
pocket? But the matter is deeper. Free 
speech is a habit. It cannot be expected 
from such men, because a particular subject 
is free from danger. Let the subject be 
dress reform, and the traders will be equally 
politic. 

This pressure of self-interest which pre- 
vents a man from speaking his mind comes 
on top of that familiar moral terrorism of 
any majority, even a majority of two persons 
against one, which is one of the ultimate 
phenomena of human intercourse. 

It is difficult to speak out a sentiment 
that your table companions disapprove of. 
Even Don Quixote was afraid to confess 
that it was he who had set the convicts at 
liberty, because he heard the barber and 
curate denounce the thing as an outrage. 

58 



SOCIETY 

Now the weight of this normal social pres- 
sure in any particular case will depend on 
how closely the individuals composing the 
majority resemble each other. But men, 
lighted by the same passion, pursuing one 
object under the similar conditions, of ne- 
cessity grow alike. By a process of natural 
selection, the self-seekers of Europe have 
for sixty years been poured into the hopper 
of our great mill. The Suabian and the 
Pole each drops his costume, his language, 
and his traditions as he goes in. They come 
out American business men; and in the sec- 
ond generation they resemble each other 
more closely in ideals, in aims, and in 
modes of thought than two brothers who had 
been bred to different trades in Europe. 

The uniformity of occupation, the uni- 
formity of law, the absence of institutions, 
like the church, the army, family pride, in 
fact, the uniformity of the present and the 
sudden evaporation of all the past, have 
ground the men to a standard. 

America turns out only one kind of man. 
Listen to the conversation of any two men 
in a street car. They are talking about the 
price of something — building material, ad- 
vertising, bonds, cigars. 

We have, then, two distinct kinds of pres- 
59 



SOCIETY 

.sure, each at its maximum, both due to 
commerce : the pressure of fear that any un- 
popular sentiment a man utters will show in 
his bank account; the pressure of a unified 
majority who are alike in their opinions, 
have no private opinions, nor patience with 
the private opinions of others. Of these 
two pressures, the latter is by far the more 
important. 

It cannot be denied that the catchwords of 
democracy have been used to intensify this 
tyranny. If the individual must submit 
when outvoted in politics, he ought to sub- 
mit when outvoted in ethics, in opinion, or 
in sentiment. Private opinion is a thing to 
be stamped out, like private law. A preju- 
dice is aroused by the very fact that a man 
thinks for himself; he is dangerous; he is 
anarchistic. 

But this misapplication of a dogma is not 
the cause but the cloak of oppression. It is 
like the theory of the divine right of Kings 
— a thing invoked by conservatism to keep 
itself in control, a shibboleth muttered by 
men whose cause will not bear argument. 

We must never expect to find in a dogma 
the explanation of the system which it props 
up. That explanation must be sought for 
60 



SOCIETY 

in history. The dogma records but does not 
explain a supremacy. Therefore, when we 
hear some one appeal to democratic principle 
for a justification in suppressing the individ- 
ual, we have to reflect how firmly must this 
custom be established, upon what a strong 
basis of interest must it rest, that it has 
power so to pervert the ideas of democracy. 
A distrust of the individual running into 
something like hatred may be seen reflected 
in the press of the United States. The 
main point is that Americans have by 
business training been growing more alike 
every day, and have seized upon any and 
every authority to aid them in disciplining 
a recusant. 

We have then a social life in which cau- 
tion and formalism prevail, and can see why 
it is that the gathering at the club was a 
dull affair. 

We must now add one dreadful fact : Many 
of these men at the club are dishonest. The 
banker has come from a Directors' meeting 
of a large corporation, where he has voted to 
buy ten thousand shares of railroad stock 
which he and his associates bought on fore- 
closure at seventeen three weeks before, but 
which now stands at thirty, because the quo- 
61 



SOCIETY 

tations have been rigged. The attorney for 
the corporation is here talking to Professor 
Scuddamore about the new citizens' move- 
ment, which the attorney has joined, for he 
is a great reformer, and lives in horror of 
the wickedness of the times. Beyond him 
sits an important man, whose corporation 
has just given a large sum to a political 
organization. Next to him is a Judge, who 
is a Republican, but fond of a chat with 
political opponents. With them is the edi- 
tor of a reform paper, whose financial arti- 
cles are of much importance to the town. A 
very eminent lawyer is in conversation with 
him. This lawyer has just received a large 
fee from the city for work which would not 
have brought him more than one-fifth of the 
amount if done for a private client. He is, 
by the way, a law partner of the latest trib- 
une of the people, a man of stainless reputa- 
tion. Here is also another type of honor, 
the middle-aged practitioner of good family, 
who has one of the best heads in town. He 
knows what all these other men are, and 
how they make their money; yet he dines at 
their houses, and gets business from them. 
On his left is a man much talked of ten 
years ago, a rare man to be seen here. He 
was ambitious, and became the hope of re- 
62 



SOCIETY 

form. But, unfortunately, he also had a tal- 
ent for business. He became rich and cyni- 
cal, and you see that he is looking about, as 
if in search of another disappointed man to 
talk to. There also is a great doctor, visit- 
ing physician of three hospitals, one of which 
is in receipt of city funds, and he knows 
the practice of packing the hospitals before 
inspection day in order to increase the 
appropriation. The man who endowed the 
hospital sits beyond. All these wires end 
in this club-room. Now start your topic — 
jest about free silver, make a merry sally on 
Mayor Jones. Start the question : " Why is 
not the last reform commissioner of the gas 
works not in jail ? " and see what a jovial 
crew you are set down with. 

You will find as to any new topic, that 
each one requires time to adjust his cravat 
to it. You are in a company of men who 
are so anxious to be reasonable, to be "just," 
that it will require them till judgment day 
to make up their minds on any point. Nor 
is it easy to say how any one of them ought 
to behave. Is it dishonest to draw divi- 
dends from a corporation which you believe 
to be corruptly managed; to wink at brib- 
ery done in the interest of widows and of 
orphans? Must you cut a client because he 
63 



SOCIETY 

owns a judge ? What proof have you of any 
of these things? Do you demand of any 
one of these men that he shall offend or 
denounce the rest, and, short of that, what 
course should he take? 

The point here made is not an ethical one 
as to how any one of these men ought to 
adjust himself to the corruption about him, 
but the sociological point — that a civiliza- 
tion based upon a commerce which is in all 
its parts corruptly managed will present a 
social life which is unintelligent and medi- 
ocre, made up of people afraid of each other, 
whose ideas are shopworn, whose manners 
are self-conscious. 

The ill-concealed dependence of these men 
on each other is not resentful. They are the 
most good-natured men in the world. But 
they are unenlightened. Without free speech 
free thought can hardly exist. Without free 
speech you cannot gather the fruits of the 
mind's spontaneous workings. When a man 
talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he 
goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole 
company has shares in the enterprise. He 
may strike out some idea which explains the 
sphinx. The moral consequences of circum- 
spect and affable reticence are even worse 
than the intellectual ones. "Live and let 
64 



SOCIETY 

live/' says our genial prudence. Well 
enough, but mark the event. No one ever 
lost his social standing merely because of 
his offences, but because of the talk about 
them. As free speech goes out the rascals 
come in. 

Speech is a great part of social life, but 
not the whole of it. Dress, bearing, ex- 
pression, betray a man, customs show char- 
acter, all these various utterances mingle 
and merge into the general tone which is 
the voice of a national temperament; pri- 
vate motive is lost in it. 

This tone penetrates and envelops every- 
thing in America. It is impossible to con- 
demn it altogether. This desire to please, 
which has so much of the shopman's smile 
in it, graduates at one end of the scale into 
a general kindliness, into public benefac- 
tions, hospitals, and college foundations; at 
the other end it is seen melting into a de- 
sire to efface one's self rather than give 
offence, to hide rather than be noticed. 

In Europe, the men in the pit at the the- 
atre stand up between the acts, face the 
house, and examine the audience at leisure. 
The American dares not do this. He can- 
not stand the isolation, nor the publicity. 
The American in a horse car can give his 
5 65 



SOCIETY 

seat to a lady, but dares not raise his voice 
while the conductor tramps over his toes. 
It violates every instinct of his commercial 
body to thrust his private concerns into 
prominence. The American addresses his 
equal, whom he knows familiarly, as Mr. 
Jones, giving him the title with as much 
subserviency as the Englishman pays to an 
unknown Earl. 

~~Mere financial dishonesty is of very little 
-importance in the history of civilization. 
Who cares whether Caesar stole or Caesar 
Borgia cheated? Their intellects stayed 
clear. The real evil that follows in the 
wake of a commercial dishonesty so general 
as ours is the intellectual dishonesty it gen- 
erates. One need not mind stealing, but 
one must cry out at people whose minds are 
so befuddled that they do not know theft 
when they see it. Robert Walpole bought 
votes. He deceived others, but he did not 
deceive himself. 

We have seen that the retailer in the 
small town could not afford to think clearly 
upon the political situation. But this was 
a mere instance, a sample of his mental atti- 
tude. He dare not face any question. He 
must shuffle, qualify, and defer. Here at 
last we have the great characteristic which 
66 



SOCIETY 

covers our continent like a climate — intel- 
lectual dishonesty. This state of mind does 
not merely prevent a man having positive 
opinions. The American is incapable of 
taking a real interest in anything. The 
lack of passion in the American — notice- 
able in his books and in himself — comes 
from the same habitual mental distraction; 
i for passion is concentration. Hence also 
the flippancy, superficiality, and easy humor 
for which we are noted. Nothing except 
the dollar is believed to be worthy the at- 
tention of a serious man. People are even 
ashamed of their tastes. Until recently, 
we thought it effeminate for a man to play 
on the piano. When a man takes a living 
interest in anything, we call him a " crank. " 
There is an element of self-sacrifice in any 
honest intellectual work which we detect at 
once and score with contumely. 

It was not solely commercial interest that 
made the biographers of Lincoln so thrifty 
to extend and veneer their book. It was 
that they themselves did not, could not, 
take an interest in the truth about him. 
The second-rate quality of all our letters 
and verse is due to the same cause. The 
intellectual integrity is undermined. The 
literary man is concerned for what " will 
67 



SOCIETY 

go," like the reformer who is half politician. 
The attention of every one in the United 
States is on some one else's opinion, not 
on truth. 

The matter resolves itself at last into Pilate's 
question : What is truth ? We do not know, 
and shall never know. But it seems to in- 
volve a certain focussing and concentration 
of the attention that brings all the life 
within us into harmony. When this hap- 
pens to us, we discover that truth is the 
only thing we had ever really cared about in 
the world. The thing seems to be the same 
thing, no matter which avenue we reach it 
by. At whatever point we are touched, we 
respond. A quartet, a cathedral, a sonnet, 
an exhibition of juggling, anything well 
done — we are at the mercy of it. But as 
the whole of us responds to it, so it takes a 
whole man to do it. Whatever cracks men 
up and obliterates parts of them, makes them 
powerless to give out this vibration. This 
is about all we know of individualism and 
the integrity of the individual. The sum of 
all the philosophies in the history of the 
world can be packed back into it. All the 
tyrannies and abuses in the world are only 
bad because they injure this integrity. We 
desire truth. It is the only thing we desire. 
68 



SOCIETY 

To have it, we must develop the individual. 
And there are practical ways and means of 
doing this. We see that all our abuses are 
only odious because they injure some indi- 
vidual man's spirit. We can trace the cor- 
ruption of politics into business, and find, 
private selfishness at the bottom of it. We 
can see this spread out into a network of 
invisible influence, in the form of intellect- 
ual dishonesty blighting the minds of our 
people. We can look still closer and see 
just why and how the temperament of the 
private man is expressed. 

We study this first in social life; for 
social life is the source and fountain of all 
things. The touchstone for any civilization 
is what one man says to another man in the 
street. Everything else that happens there 
bears a traceable relation to the tone of his 
voice. The press reflects it, the pulpit 
echoes it, the literature reproduces it, the 
architecture embodies it. 

The rays of force which start in material 
prosperity pass through the focus of social 
life, and extend out into literature, art, 
architecture, religion, philosophy. All these 
things are but the sparks thrown off the ges- 
tures and gaits, the records of the social life 
of some civilization. That is the reason 
69 



SOCIETY 

why it has been useful to pause over a 
club-house and study its inmates. The 
ball-room, the dinner-table, would have been 
equally instructive. The deference to reign- 
ing convention is the same everywhere. The 
instinct of self-concealment, the policy of 
classing like with like, leads to the herding 
of the young with the young only, the sport- 
ing with the sporting only, the rich with the 
rich only, which is the bane of our society. 
The suffocation is mitigated here and there 
by the influence of ambitious and educated 
women. They are doing their best to stem 
the tide which they can neither control nor 
understand. The stratification of our society, 
and its crystallization into social groups, is 
little short of miraculous, considering the 
lightning changes of scene. The nouveaux 
riches of one decade are the old noblesse of 
the next decade, and yet any particular set, 
at any particular time, has its exclusions, 
its code of hats and coats and small talk, 
which are more rigid than those of London. 
The only place in the country where soci- 
ety is not dull is Washington, because in 
Washington politics have always forced the 
social elements to mix; because in Wash- 
ington, some embers of the old ante-bellum 
society survived; because the place has no 
70 



SOCIETY 

commerce, and because the foreign diplomats 
have been a constant factor, educating the 
Americans in social matters. But Wash- 
ington is not the centre of American civil- 
ization. The controlling force in American 
life is not in its politics, but in commerce. 
New York is the head and heart of the 
United States. Chicago is America. And 
the elements of this life must be sought, as 
always, in the small towns. Find the social 
factors which are common to New York, to 
Poughkeepsie, and to Newport, and you have 
the keynote to the country. We began with 
a city club. But it would have made no 
difference what gathering we entered — a 
drawing-room at Newport, a labor union in 
Fifteenth Street — we should have found the 
same phenomena, — formalism, suppression 
of the individual, intellectual dishonesty. 

The dandy at Newport who conscientiously 
follows his leaders and observes the cab rule, 
the glove ordinance, and the mystery of the 
oyster fork, is governed by the same law, is 
fettered by the same force, as the labor man 
who fears to tell his fellows that he approves 
of Waring' s clean streets. Each is a half- 
man, each is afraid of his fellows, and for 
the same reason. Each is commercial, keeps 
his place by conciliatory methods, and will 
7 1 



SOCIETY 

be punished for contumacy by the loss of his 
job. Neither of them has an independent 
opinion upon any subject. 

The charge brought against our million- 
aire society is that it is vulgar. The houses 
are palaces, the taste is for the most part 
excellent, the people are in every sense but 
the commercial sense more virtuous than the 
rich of any other nation. Wealth is poured 
out in avalanches. 

Why is all this display not magnificent? 
The millionaire society is not vulgar, but it 
is insignificant. The reason is, that you 
cannot have splendor without personal and 
intellectual independence, and this does not 
exist in America. The conversation on the 
Commodore's steam yacht is tedious. The 
talk at the weekly meeting of the amalga- 
mated glaziers is insipid, and impresses you 
with the selfishness of mankind. 

Now what is at the bottom of this iden- 
tity ? We are passing through the great age 
of distribution. It is not confined to Amer- 
ica. It qualifies European history. All the 
different kinds of Socialism are mere proofs 
of it. Every one either wants to get some- 
thing himself, or, if he is a philosopher, 
wants to show other people how to get it. 
Even Henry George thought that man lives 
7* 



SOCIETY 

by bread alone; at least, bethought that if 
you only give every one lots of bread, that is 
all you need provide for; the rest will fol- 
low. In America we are leading the world 
in the intensity with which this phase of 
progress goes on, because in America there 
is nothing else to occupy men's minds. Let 
us return to our social focus and its relation 
to the arts. 

The world has groped for three thousand 
years to find the connection between moral- 
ity and the fine arts. It may be that we 
stand here on the borderland of discovery. 
We can at least see that they are not likely 
to arise in an era of subserviency and intel- 
lectual fog. 

The fine arts are departments of science, 
and the attitude of mind of the artist toward 
his work, or of the public toward his product, 
is that of an interest in truth for its own 
sake. It is the attitude of the scientific man 
toward his problems. The scientists do not 
waver or cringe. They are the great bullies 
of this era. They draw their power from 
their work. They seek, they proclaim, they 
monopolize truth. There is in them the 
note of greatness, not because of their dis- 
coveries, but because of their pursuit. 

Commercial or sexual crime or violence, 
73 



SOCIETY 

that does not unman the artist, ought not 
to extinguish art, and it never has done so. 
Anything that has made him time-serving 
or truthless ought to show in his work, and 
it always has done so. 

Any system of morality or conjunction of 
circumstances that tends to make men tell 
the truth as they see it will tend to produce 
what the world will call art. If the state- 
ment be accurate, the world will call it 
beautiful. Put it as you will, art is self- 
assertion and beauty is accuracy. Out of 
the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh. 

Anybody can see that fiction depends upon 
social conditions; for it is nothing but a 
description of them. 

Take his clubs and his routs away from 
Thackeray, his hunting away from White- 
Melville, his peasantry away from Scott, his 
street life away from Dickens, and where 
would their books be? Vigorous and pic- 
turesque individuality must precede good 
fiction. The great American novel, except 
as the outcome of a vigorous social life, is 
the dream of an idiot. You must have an 
age of ebullition, where the spontaneous life 
about the novelist forces itself into his 
books, before you can have good fiction. 
Architecture depends so plainly upon social 
74 



SOCIETY 

life, that we have only to look at our country 
houses from Colonial times down, to read the 
hearts of the inmates. And so with the 
other fine arts and decorations, they are 
mere languages. 

It is thought that our modern life is more 
complex than that of the eighteenth century, 
because the machinery by which it is car- 
ried on is expanded. Transportation, news- 
papers, corporations, oceans of books and 
magazines, foreign cables, have changed the 
forms by which power is transmitted. But 
the manifestations of humanity in govern- 
ment, in social life, and in the arts proceed 
upon the same principles as ever. Every- 
thing depends as completely on personal in- 
tercourse as it did in Athens. The real 
struggle comes between two men across a 
table, my force against your force. The 
devices which political philosophy has al- 
ways approved, are those which protect the 
spirit of the individual, and enable it to grow 
strong. The struggles for English liberty 
have been struggles over taxation. The 
rights of the sovereign to seize a man's 
property, or imprison his body without form 
of law, were abolished. This comparative 
financial independence of the English sub- 
ject has been valued as the basis of spiritual 
75 



SOCIETY 

independence. It has no other claim to be 
thought important. Yet while we have been 
praising our bills of rights and bulwarks of 
liberty, commerce in the United States has 
been bringing power after power, battalion 
after battalion, to bear upon the integrity of 
spirit of the individual man. Here is a 
situation which no legislation can meet. 
Civil liberty has been submerged in the 
boss system. But this is a mere symptom. 
It is valuable only because it brings strik- 
ingly into view the intellectual bondage it 
denotes. It is valuable only because it gives 
us a fighting ground, an educational arena in 
which the fight for intellectual liberty may 
be begun. 

It is unnecessary to go over the steps of 
the argument backward, and to show how 
our citizen movements are a mere sign that 
the individual is becoming more unselfish. 
How, partly through the settling of commerce 
into more stable conditions, partly through 
revulsion in the heart of man against so 
much wickedness, a reign of better things is 
coming. The Christian Endeavorers, the 
University Settlements, the innumerable 
leagues and propaganda which bring no dog- 
mas, but which stand for faith — speak for 
multitudes, affect every one. Their influ- 

7 6 



SOCIETY 

ence can already be traced into business, 
into social life, and out again into every 
department of our existence. The revolu- 
tion is going forward on a great scale, and 
the demonstration is about to be worked out 
throughout the continent as if it were a 
blackboard. 

The man who has subscribed $1,000 to 
the reform campaign, the man who has 
worked for the cause, and the man who has 
voted the ticket, have met. This personal 
meeting, this social focus, exists and is in- 
destructible. These people who have been 
kept apart by the old political conditions, by 
the boss system, and the capitalist; these 
men whom every element of selfishness and 
corruption fought with the instinct of self- 
preservation to keep separate, have come 
together. The downfall of the old social 
system, and the redistribution of every force 
in the community, is inevitable. In the first 
place, every individual in the community has 
talked about the movement with an intensity 
proportionate to his power of good. Our 
form of government throws the moral idea 
with terrible force, as a practical issue, into 
the life of each man. "Thou art the man." 
The extreme simplicity of 6ur social fabric 
77 



SOCIETY 

makes it impossible for any one to get be- 
hind his institution, his class, his prejudice. 
There is no one who cannot be shown up. 
We are as defenceless before virtue as we 
were before selfishness. Our politics can be 
worked as effectively by one passion as by 
the other — but we are only just beginning 
to find this out. 

Free speech and the grouping, classing, 
and mingling of men according to intellect, 
and not according to income, have begun 
already. They are not more the outcome 
than they are the cause of these citizens' 
movements. They are the same elemental 
thing. The love of truth is the same pas- 
sion as the veneration for the individual. It 
is impossible to really want reform and to 
remain socially exclusive or socially defer- 
ential. And so, a social life is beginning to 
emerge in New York, based on the noblest 
and the most natural passion that can stir in 
the heart of man The results in the field 
of practical politics, will be that "society" 
— at least such of our drawing-rooms and 
dinner tables as any one, whether foreigner 
or native, knows or cares anything about — 
will resume the political importance which 
such places have always held in civilized 
times, and of which nothing but extraordi- 
78 



SOCIETY 

nary and transient conditions have deprived 
them. Let any one who doubts this, com- 
pare the club talk and dinner table talk of 
to-day, with the talk of ten years ago. It 
would be childish to guess the positive re- 
sults on the arts, theatres, novels, verse 
which will follow ; but you can no more keep 
the spirit of freedom out of these things than 
you can keep it out of personal manners. 
These are changing daily. The decorums 
and codes of behavior, the old self-conscious 
ness and self-distrust are dropping off. Stead- 
ily the flood of life advances, inspiring all 
things. 



79 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 



Ill 

EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

I have two boys, aged seven and four. 
They required a governess and I got one. 
After a couple of months during which the 
usual experiences in the training of young 
children were gone through, I discovered that 
it was I who was being educated. My mind 
was being swayed and drawn to a point of 
view. I was in contact with a method so 
profound that it seemed as if I were dealing 
with, or rather being dealt with by the forces 
of nature. I was in the presence of great 
genius. What was it? The text book on 
Froebel by Hughes in the International 
Series on Education made the matter clear. 
Froebel was an experimental psychologist 
who used the terms of the German philoso- 
phy of his day. But the facts of life, the 
thing he was studying, was never for a 
moment absent from his mind. He lived 
in an age when the ideas of evolution were 
in the air, and before they had received 

83 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

their conclusive proof by being applied to 
morphology. 

This application has for a time killed phi- 
losophy, for it has identified the new ideas 
with the physical sciences, and led men to 
study the human mind in psychology and 
from without. Whereas the mind and its 
laws can, in the nature of things, be studied 
only through introspection. Froebel had a 
scientific intellect of the very first calibre; 
he had the conception of flux, of change, of 
evolution to start with ; and he took up intro- 
spectively the study of the laws of the human 
mind, choosing that province of the universe 
where they are most visibly and typically 
exposed, — the mind of the growing child. 

The "laws" which he states are little 
more than a description of the phenomena 
that he observed. They are statements of 
the results of his experiments, and the lan- 
guage he employs can be translated to suit 
the education of almost any one. His atten- 
tion was so concentrated upon fact that his 
terminology does not mislead. It can be 
translated into the language of metaphysics, 
of Christian theology, or of modern science, 
and it remains incorruptibly coherent. 

His method of study was the only method 
which can obtain results in philosophy, 
84 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

self-study unconsciously carried on. He 
observed the child, and guessed at what was 
going on in its mind by a comparison with 
what he knew of himself. He was anxious 
to train young children intelligently, and he 
found it necessary to describe and formulate 
his knowledge of the operation of their 
minds. It turns out that he made a state- 
ment of the universe more comprehensive, a 
philosophy more universal, than any other of 
which we have any record. 

But this is not the most important thing 
he did. He devised a method based upon 
his experiments and set agoing the kinder- 
garten upon its course in conquest of the 
world. If it had not been for this, he might 
never have been heard of, for the world has 
small use for systems of philosophy, however 
profound, expressed in terms which have been 
superseded and are become inexpressive. 
But Froebel started a practice. He showed 
the way. He put in the hands of persons to 
whom his philosophy must ever remain a 
mystery, the means of working out those 
practical ends for which that philosophy was 
designed. 

The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that 
he saw the essential. What sort of an ani- 
mal is man, asks the morphologist, for he is 
85 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

beginning to reach this point in his studies, 
and before he has asked it, Froebel has an- 
swered him. 

'Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings 
hast thou ordained strength. ' 

It may be said at once that the substance 
of everything Froebel says was known be- 
fore. Solomon and Orpheus, Marcus Aure- 
lius, Emerson, and all of us have known it. 
Otherwise Froebel would be unimportant. 
It is his correlation and his formulation of 
the main facts about human life that make 
him important. It is as a summary of wis- 
dom, as a focus of idea, as a lens through 
which the rest of the ideas in the world can 
be viewed, that he is great. 

The laws he discovered may be stated in 
a paragraph. The child is a growing organ- 
ism. It is a unity. It develops through 
creative activity. It is benefited by contact 
with other children and is happy in propor- 
tion as it is unselfishly employed. 

Let us assume for a moment that these 
things are true, that they are the most im- 
portant truths about the child ; and let us see 
how they must affect our views of life, of 
politics, sociology, art, religion, conduct. 
There is of course no moment at which the 
86 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

child ceases to be a child. The laws of its 
growth and being are not at any discover- 
able time superseded by any new laws. Man 
as a creature, as an organism, has here by 
Froebel, and for the first time in history, 
been ingenuously studied, and the main laws 
of him noted. With the discovery that he 
is a unity, there vanishes every classification 
of science made since the days of Aristotle. 
They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule 
distinctions, useful as aids in the further 
pushing of our studies into the workings of 
this unity. Take up now a book of political 
economy, a poem, a history : this thought of 
Froebel's runs through it like quicksilver. 
The scheme of thought of the writer is by 
it dissolved at once into human elements. 
You find you are studying the operation of 
the mind of some one, whom you picture to 
yourself as a man, as a unit ; you are inter- 
preting this by your own experience. It is 
all psychology, you are pushing your analy- 
sis. The universe is receiving its interpre- 
tation through you yourself. We are thus 
brought to the point of view of the mystic, 
as the only conceivable point of view. 

"That the organism develops by creative 
activity/' This might have come as a de- 
duction from Darwin. It is an expression 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

in metaphysical language of the "struggle 
for life." Froebel discovered it indepen- 
dently. The consequences of a belief in it 
are so tremendous, that no man who is not 
prepared to spend the rest of his life com- 
pletely dominated by the idea, ought even 
to pause to consider it. 

Your capacities, your beliefs, your devel- 
opment, your spiritual existence are the 
result of what you do. Active creation of 
some sort, occupation which takes your en- 
tire attention and calls upon you, merely 
incidentally and as a matter of course, for 
thought, resource, individual or original force; 
this will develop you and nothing else will. 

The connection between this thought and 
the previous one is apparent. It is only by 
such creative activity that the organism as a 
unit gets into play. If you set a man copy- 
ing or memorizing, you have occupied only 
a fraction of him. If you set him to mak- 
ing something, the minute he begins, his 
attention is concentrated. Willy nilly he 
is trying to make something significant, he 
is endeavoring to express himself, the forces 
and powers within him begin coming to his 
succor, offering aid and suggestion. Before 
he knows it, his whole being is in opera- 
tion. The result is a statement of some 
88 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

sort, and in the process of making it the 
creature has developed. But when you 
say " significant " you have already implied 
the existence of other organisms. He is 
not expressing himself only, he is express- 
ing them all, and here comes Froebel with 
his third great discovery, that it is by con- 
stant personal intercourse with others that 
the power to express is gained. And on top 
of this comes the last law, so closely related 
to the third as to be merely a new view of 
it, but discovered by experiment, tested by 
practice, announced empirically and as a 
fact, that the child is unselfish and only 
really happy when at work creatively and for 
the use and behoof of others. 

This conclusion throws back its rays over 
the course of the argument, and we are com- 
pelled to see, what we have already known, 
that unselfishness and intellectual develop- 
ment are one and the same thing, that there 
is no failure of intellect which cannot be 
expressed in terms of selfishness, and no 
selfishness that cannot be expressed as in- 
tellectual shortcoming. Criminology has 
reached the same point by another route. 

The matter is really very simple, for any- 
thing self-regardant means a return of the 
organism upon itself, a stepping on your 
89 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

own toes, and brings self -consciousness, dis- 
comfort, pain. Self-sacrifice on the other 
hand brings fulfilment. The self-sacrifice 
is always illusory, and the development real. 
This becomes frightfully apparent in ingen- 
uous and unhappy love affairs, for the organ- 
ism robbed of fulfilment returns upon itself. 

It makes little difference what province of 
thought we begin with in applying these 
views to the world. They give results like 
a table of logarithms. They do more than 
this, they unravel the most complex situa- 
tions, they give the key to conduct and put 
a compass in the hands of progress. They 
explain history, they support religion, they 
justify instinct, they interpret character. 
They give the formula for doing consciously 
what mankind has been doing unconsciously 
in so far as it has been doing what any one 
of us in his soul approves of or cares to 
imitate. 

Let us take up the most obvious deduc- 
tions. If people develop according to their 
activities, their opinions will be a mere 
reflex of their conduct. What they see in 
the world comes out of what they do in the 
world. Here in a mere niche of Froebel 
we find the whole of Emerson. 

The power and permanence of Sainte 

9° 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

Beuve are due to his having applied this 
theory to the interpretation of literature. 
He is not content till he has seen the rela- 
tion between the conduct and the opinions, 
the conduct and the art of a character. 

Or take Emerson himself, why was it that 
being so much he was not more? How came 
it that after his magnificent prologue in the 
Phi Beta Kappa address, which is like the 
opening of a symphony, he relapsed into 
iteration and brilliant but momentary vis- 
ions of his own horizon? He kept repeat- 
ing his theme till he piped himself into 
fragmentary inconsequence. The reason is 
that he had learned all he knew before he 
retired to Concord and contemplation. Ac- 
tive life would have made him blossom an- 
nually and last like Gladstone. 

Or take Goethe : all that is questionable 
in him results from his violation of two of 
Froebers laws of psychology. He fixed his 
attention upon self-development and thereby 
gradually ossified. Every moment of ego- 
tism was an intellectual loss. His contact 
with people, meanwhile, became more and 
more formal as he grew older, and his work 
more and more inexpressive. 

Give me a man's beliefs, and I will give 
you his occupation. What has happened to 
9 1 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

that radical that he seems to have become so 
moderate and reasonable ? You find that for 
six months he has been clerk to the Civil 
Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical 
poetry of this intellectual man as vacant as 
the fashion print he edits for his daily bread ? 
His employment has tracked his mind to 
these unearthly regions. He is dead here 
too. 

There is no such thing as independent 
belief, based on evidence and reflection. 
The thing we call belief is a mere record 
left by conduct. If you sincerely go through 
the regimen of Loyola's manual, you will 
come out a Jesuit. You can no more resist 
it than you can resist the operation of ether. 
This man is an optimist. It means that he 
has struggled. That man is a pessimist. It 
means that he has shirked. Here is one 
who has been in touch with all movements 
for good during a dismal era of corruption, 
and yet he has no faith. It means that the 
whole of him has not been enlisted. His 
conscience has drawn him forward. It is 
not enough. There is compromise in him. 
He is not an absolute fighter. 

Here is the most excellent gentleman in 
America, an old idealist untouchably tran- 
scendental, an educated man. To your 
92 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

amazement he thinks that it is occasionally 
necessary to subsidize the powers of evil. 
He was bred a banker. 

Here is a village schoolma'am who from 
a rag of information in a county paper has 
divined the true inwardness of a complicated 
controversy at Washington which you hap- 
pen to know all about. She has been re- 
forming a poorhouse. 

A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. 
He relies on beneficence and persuasion. 
He does not know the world better than a 
club loafer knows it. The only entry to it 
is by attack, the only progress by action. 

B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momen- 
tary want of delicacy which gives you a 
shock, and which you forgive him, saying: 
"It is a coarseness of natural fibre." It is 
no such thing. There is in every man a 
natural fibre as fine as a poet's. His coarse- 
ness is the residuum of an act. 

You meet a man whom you have known 
as a court stenographer, and whom you have 
supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. 
At a chop house he gives you a discourse on 
Plato's Phaedrus which he interprets in a 
novel way. The brains of the man surprise 
you. This man, though he looks sordid, 
positively must have been sending a younger 

n 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

brother to college during many years. There 
is no other explanation of him. 

The nemesis of conduct then stalks about 
in the form of a natural law, not as the pseudo 
science of fancy, but as a mode of growth, 
modestly formulated by a great naturalist. 

Take the matter up on its other side. 
You can only discover in the universe, try 
how you will, strain your eyes how you 
please, you can only see what you have 
lived. Out of our activity comes our char- 
acter, and it is with this that we see beauty 
or ugliness, hope or despair. It is by this 
that we gauge the operation of economic law 
and of all other spiritual forces. It is with 
this that we interpret all things. What we 
see is only our own lives. 

We are all more or less in contact with 
human life. We live in a pandemonium, a 
paradise of illustrations, and if we have only 
eyes to see, there is enough in any tenement 
house to-day to lay bare the heart and pro- 
gress of Greek art. 

But the worst is to come — the horror that 
makes intellect a plaything. By a double 
consequence the past fetters the future. 
Once take any course and our eyes begin 
to see it as right, our hearts to justify it. 
Only fighting can save us, and we see noth- 
94 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

ing to fight for. Thraldom enters and night 
like death where no voice reaches. The 
eternal struggle is for vision. 

How idiotic are the compliments or the 
contempt of the inexperienced. Nothing but 
life teaches. Hallam thinks Juliet immod- 
est, and he had read all the literatures of 
Europe. If you want to understand the Greek 
civilization you have got to be Sophocles. 
If you want to understand the New Testa- 
ment you have got to be Christ. If you want 
to understand that most complex and difficult 
of all things, the present, you must be some 
or all of it, some of it any way. You must 
have it ground into you by a contact so 
wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, 
that you lose consciousness, and afterwards 
— next year — you will understand. 

Here is the reaction familiar to all men 
since the dawn of history, which makes the 
man of action the hero of all times. It goes 
in courage, it comes out power. 

This reaction, this transformation goes 
forward in the very stuff that we are made 
of, and if we come to look at it closely, we 
are obliged to speak of it in terms of con- 
sciousness. There are so many different 
kinds of consciousness, that the best we can 
do is to remind some one else of the kind 
95 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

we mean. The hand of the violinist is un- 
conscious to the extent that it is functioning 
properly, and as his command over music 
develops, this unconsciousness creeps up his 
arm and possesses his brain and being, until 
he, as he plays, is completely unself-con- 
scious and his music is the mere projection 
of an organism which is functioning freely. 

But this condition of complete concentra- 
tion makes us in a different sense of the 
word self-conscious in the highest degree, 
self-comprehending, self-controlled, self-ex- 
pressing. And it is in this philosophical 
sense that the word self-conscious is used by 
the Germans, and may sometimes be conven- 
iently used by us, if we can do so without 
foregoing the right to use the words con- 
scious and unconscious in their popular sense 
, at other times. 

The discovery of Froebel was that this 
mastery over our own powers was to be ob- 
tained only through creative activity. The 
suggestion, it may be noted, is destined to 
reorganize every school of violin playing in 
Europe. For we have here the major canon 
of a rational criticism. We find that in 
the old vocabulary such words as genius, 
temperament, style, originality, etc., have 
always been fumblingly used to denote dif- 

96 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

ierent degrees in which some man's brain 
was working freely and with full self-con- 
sqiousness. A deliverance of this kind has 
always been designated as ' creative, ' no 
matter in what field it was found. 

Approaching the matter more closely, we 
see that the whole of the man must have 
responded in real life to every particle of 
experience which he uses in his work. An 
imitation means something which does not 
represent an original unitary vibration. 

Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad 
Gretchen a snatch of German song in imita- 
tion of Ophelia. The treatment does not 
fit the character. It has only been through 
that part of Goethe's mind with which he 
read Shakespeare. As a sequel to this sugges- 
tion, the peasant of the early scenes has lav- 
ished upon her all the various reminiscences 
of the pathetic that Goethe could muster. 
It is moving, but it is inorganic. It is 
not true. 

For note this, that while it takes the 
whole of a man to do anything true, no mat- 
ter how small, anything that the whole of 
him does is right. Hence the inimitable 
grotesques of greatness, the puns in tragedy. 
These things belong to the very arcana of 
nature. By and by, when the reasons are 
7 97 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

understood, nature will be respected. No 
one will attempt to imitate genius, or to 
reproduce an artistic effect of any kind. 

If we look at recent literature by the light 
of this canon, we find the reason for its in- 
feriority. It is the work of half minds, of 
men upon whose intelligence the weight of 
a dogma is pressing. 

The eclipse of philosophy was of course 
reflected in fiction. There is the same 
trouble with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. 
Each of them thinks to wrest the secrets of 
sociology from external observation. Their 
books lack objectivity and are ephemeral. 
Kant and Balzac did better because their 
method was truer. 

Everything good that has been done in 
the last fifty years has been done in the 
teeth of current science. The whole raft of 
English scientists are children playing with 
Raphael's brushes the moment they leave 
some specialty. There never lived a set of 
men more blinded by dogma, blinded to 
the meaning of the past, to the trend of the 
future, by the belief that they had found new 
truth. Not one of them can lift the stone 
and show what lies under Darwin's demon- 
stration. They run about with little pam- 
phlets and proclaim a New Universe like 

98 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs 
into a great Dogma of Unbelief, and throw 
away the kernel of life with the shell. This 
was inevitable. A generation or two was 
well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the 
Dogma of Science — the old guard dogma 
that dies but never surrenders. Hereafter 
it will be plain that the whole matter is a 
matter of symbols on the one hand, knowl 
edge of human nature on the other. 

Herbert Spencer has been a useful church- 
warden to science, but his knowledge of life 
was so trifling, his own personal development 
so one-sided, that his sociology is a farce. 

This canon of criticism explains in a very 
simple manner the art ages, times when 
apparently every one could paint, or speak, 
or compose. The art which is lost is really 
the art of courageous action. Neither war 
nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for 
feeling can no more be lost than force, and 
the power to express it depends upon an in- 
terest in life. The past has enriched us 
with conventions, and whenever a man or a 
group of men arises who uses them and is 
not subdued to them, we have art. The 
thing is easy. To the doers it is a mere 
knack of the attention. 

We had almost thought that art was fin- 
99- 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

ished, and we find we are standing at the 
beginning of all things. Froebel has found 
a formula which fits every human activity. 

Let us take the supreme case, the apogee 
of human development, and what will it be ? 

The sum of all possible human knowledge 
is, as we have seen, an expansion of our 
understanding of human nature, and this is 
got by intercourse, by dealing with men, by 
getting them to do something. In order to 
make them do it, in order to govern, you 
must understand, and the rulers of mankind 
are the wisest of the species. They sum- 
marize society. Solomon, Caesar, Hilde- 
brand, Lincoln, Bismarck, these men knew 
their world. 

But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype 
of all possible human fulfilment, there is no 
other art or province of employment to which 
the same views do not apply. When any 
man reaps some of the power which his toil 
has sown, and throws it out as a note or a 
book or a statue, it has an organic relation 
to the human soul and is valuable forever. 
There is only one rule of art. Let a man 
work at a thing till it looks right to him. 
Let him adjust and refine it till, as he looks 
at it, it passes straight into him, and he 
grows for a moment unconscious again, that 
ioo 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

the forces which produced it may be satis- 
fied. As it stands then, it is the best he 
can do. In so far as we completely develop 
this power we become completely happy and 
completely useful, for our acts, our state- 
ments, our notes, our books, our statues 
become universally significant. 

Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose 
the sense of your identity, to know that your 
destiny, your self, is an organic part of all 
men. It is they that speak. It is them- 
selves that have been found and expressed. 
It was this toward which we tended, this 
that we cared for — action, art, intellect, 
unselfishness, are they not one thing? 

The complete development of every indi- 
vidual is necessary to our complete happi- 
ness. And there is no reason why any one 
who has ever been to a dull dinner party 
should doubt this. Nay, history gives proof 
that solitude is dangerous. Man cannot 
sing, nor write, nor paint, nor reform, nor 
build, nor do anything except die, alone. 
The reasons for this are showered upon us 
by the idea of Froebel, no matter which side 
of it is turned toward us. 

This philosophy which seemed so dry till 
we began to see what it meant, begins now 
to circumscribe God and include everything, 

IOI 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

For Christ himself was one whose thoughts 
were laws and whose deeds are universal 
truth. Shakespeare's plays are universal 
truth. They are the projection of a com- 
pletely developed and completely uncon- 
scious human intellect. They educated 
Germany, and it is to the study of them 
that Hegel's view of life is due. The great 
educational forces in the world are propor- 
tioned in power to the development of the 
individual man in the epochs they date from. 
Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises a 
personal influence which directs thought for 
a thousand years and qualifies time forever. 

The division of the old ethics into egoism 
and altruism receives the sanction of sci- 
ence. The turning of the attention upon 
selfish ends, no matter how remote nor how 
momentary, hurts the organism, contracts 
the intellect, dries up the emotions, and is 
felt as unhappiness. The turning of the 
attention toward public aims benefits the 
organism, enlarges the intellect, and is felt 
as happiness. There is no complexity pos- 
sible, for any mixed motive is a selfish 
motive. 

All the virtues are different names for the 
injunction of self-mastery, by which the in- 
ternal struggle is made more severe, and the 

102 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

force cooped in and controlled until it is 
released in the functioning of the whole 
man. 

In any sincere struggle for right, then, no 
matter how petty, we are fighting for man- 
kind, and this is just what everybody has 
always known, always believed. 

It is thrown at us as a great paradox, that 
somebody must pay the bills; that if you 
live upon charity and can succeed in getting 
yourself crucified, you are still a mere prod- 
uct of thrift and selfishness somewhere. 
But the paradox is the same if put the other 
way, for selfishness would never support 
you. 

The question is purely one of fact, what 
thing comes first, what thing satisfies the 
heart of man. He may support himself 
merely as a means to help others. A man 
may start a pauper and die a millionaire, and 
yet never think a thought or do an act which 
does not add to the welfare of man. It is a 
question of ultimate controlling intention. 

Man the microcosm is a kingdom where 
reigns continual war. Now he is a furnace 
of love, the next moment he is a mean 
scamp. We know very little about the 
mechanism by which these microcosms com- 
municate with one another. It seems likely 
103 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

that every iota of feeling must be either 
transmitted or transformed; that if a spasm 
of selfishness be conveyed, or some part of 
it, even by a glimpse of the eye, it must 
leave a record of injury and start on a career 
of injury, just so much loss to the world. 
On the other hand it may be transformed into 
the other kind of force and expended later 
in good. 

The thing is governed by some simple 
law, although man has not yet been able to 
reduce it to algebra. What is most curious 
is this, that the tendency of any man to 
believe in the reaction as a law, is not de- 
pendent upon his scientific training, but 
upon his moral experience. The best heads 
in physics will still betray a belief that a 
man must be able to afford to be unselfish, 
that selfishness often does good, that it is a 
muddled up affair, and a thing outside of 
science which they will get round to later. 
Everybody sees a few degrees in the arc of 
this law. Read the index on the quadrant 
and you will have his character. Now and 
then some saint swears he sees a circle. 

Let us press the inquest. It is not likely 

that life itself is duplex or consists of two 

kinds of force, one egoistic, one altruistic. 

The likelihood is the other way. There is 

104 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

only one force which vibrates through these 
organisms. It is absolutely beneficent only 
when it completely controls one of them, so 
that the whole thing sings together. 

This music is the highest, but the notes 
that go to make it up are everywhere. Altru- 
ism does not arise, is not imposed from with- 
out, at any period or by any crisis, by progress 
or by society. The spiral unwinds with the 
unwinding life upon the globe. It is the 
form of illusion under which all life pro- 
ceeds. It is the law of mind. The eye 
treats space and color as entities. It can- 
not see on any other terms. The stomach 
digests food, but not its own lining. We 
are obliged to think in terms of the objec- 
tive universe. We are not wholesome unless 
we are self-forgetting. There is no cranny 
in all the million manifestations of nature 
where you can interfere between the organism 
and its object without representing disease. 

And man is more than a mere altruistic 
animal. At least the religions of Humanity 
have never expressed him. At those times 
when he is entirely unselfish and therefore 
entirely himself, when he feels himself to 
be one single well-spring, all unselfishness, 
all love, all reverence, all service to some- 
thing not himself, yet something personal, 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

he has faith. The theologies are attempts 
to formulate this state of mind in order that 
it may be preserved. It is clear enough that 
every mind must speak in its own symbols, 
and that the symbols of one must always 
appear to another as illusions. Yet each 
man for himself knows he faces a reality. 
This is a psychological necessity. Destroy 
the belief, and on the instant he changes. 
Show him that he is the victim of an illu- 
sion, and he is divided, a half man. A man 
whose mind is divided, as, for instance, by 
the consciousness of a personal motive, can- 
not believe. He stands like the wicked king 
in the play of Hamlet; unable to pray. It 
is a psychological impossibility. 

The concern of mankind for their forms 
of doctrine is gratuitous. Faith re-appears 
under new names. You cannot convince a 
lover that he is bent on self-development, 
nor any decent man that he does not believe 
in, is not controlled by something higher than 
himself. The question is not one of words. 

We may trace this reverent attitude of 

mind upward through the acts and activities 

of the spirit, and it makes no difference 

whether we regard religion as the source 

and origin of them all or as the summary of 

them all. 

1 06 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

In Shakespeare's plays we see a cycle of 
human beings, the most living that we have 
ever met with, and the absence of mystical 
or emotional religion from many of the plays 
is one of the wonders of nature. There is 
no God anywhere, and God is everywhere; 
we are not offended. The reason may be 
that the element has been employed in the 
act of creation. Religion has been con- 
sumed in the development of character. It 
is felt in the relation of Shakespeare to the 
characters. It is here seen as artistic per- 
fection. The same is true of the Greek 
statues and of the Sistine Sibyls, and of 
other work left by those two periods, the 
only other periods in which the individual 
attained completion. 

Observe that in all this philosophy there 
is no dogma anywhere, no term whose defini- 
tion you have to learn, no term which makes 
the lying claim that it can be used twice 
with the same connotation. Froebel had 
the instinct of a poet and knew his language 
was figurative. It was this that freed him 
from the Middle Ages and gave him to the 
future. He took theology as lightly as he 
took metaphysics. He did not impose them, 
he evoked them. He lived and thought in 
the spirit. 

107 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

If you turn from Froebel's analysis of 
human nature to Goethe's, there seem to be 
a thousand years between them. The one 
is scientific, the other is mediaeval. The 
one has freed himself from the influences of 
the revival of learning, the other has not. 
The one is open, the other is closed. The 
one is free, the other is self-conscious. But 
Froebel has not yet set free the rest of the 
race, and of course the literature and prac- 
tices of the kindergartners are full of dog- 
mas. The terms of Froebel are a snare to 
those whose interest in childhood came later 
than their interest in education and whose 
attention is fixed upon the terms rather than 
upon the child. He is easy reading to the 
other sort. 

But more important than Froebel's formu- 
lation of these great truths was his formula- 
tion of subsidiary truths. I do not mean 
his labored systems, but his practical sug- 
gestions born of experience as to how to 
help another person to develop. It was 
these methods, this attitude of the teacher 
towards the child, of the individual towards 
his fellow, that came at me in my own house 
unexpectedly, emanating from some unknown 
mind, which seemed so great as practically 
to include Christianity. 
1 08 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

"Do not imagine," he says at every mo 
ment, "that you can do anything for this 
creature except by getting it to move spon- 
taneously. You have not begun till you 
have done this, and remember that anything 
else you do is just so much harm." 

He was never tired of suggesting devices 
for doing this. The following passage gives 
in a few words the answer to the most im- 
portant practical question in life : how we 
ought to approach another human being. 
The thing is said so simply, it seems almost 
commonplace, yet it comes from one greater 
than Kant. 

"Between educator and pupil, between 
request and obedience, there should invisi- 
bly rule a third something to which educa- 
tor and pupil are equally subject. This 
third something is the right, the best, neces- 
sarily conditioned and expressed without 
arbitrariness in the circumstances. The 
calm recognition, the clear knowledge, and 
the serene, cheerful obedience to the rule of 
this third something, is the particular feat- 
ure that should be constantly and clearly 
manifest in the bearing and the conduct of 
the educator and teacher, and often firmly 
and sternly emphasized by him." 

Beneath this statement there lies a law of 
109 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

reaction. The human organism responds in 
kind. Strike a man and he strikes, sneer 
and he sneers, forget and he forgets. If you 
wish to convince him that you are right, 
concede that from his point of view he is 
right, then move the point and he follows. 
If you keep your temper in teaching a child, 
you teach him to keep his temper, and this 
is more important than his lesson. 

The difficulty we find is to resist the reac- 
tion in ourselves to some one else's initia- 
tive. The affair is outside the province of 
reason, and results from a transfer of force 
by means which we do not understand. The 
command to "turn the other cheek" is a 
picturesque figure for the attitude which 
will enable you to prevail the quickest 
and by the highest means, and which 
Froebel enables us to see in its scientific 
aspect. 

But it is unnecessary to illustrate further 
what any one who comes in contact with a 
kindergarten will, through all the mists of 
dogma and ignorance which overspread the 
place, discover for himself. We have a sci- 
ence founded upon human nature, applied to 
education. Mr. Hughes in his closing para- 
graph uses the language of theology, but he 
makes no overstatement : — 
no 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

"When Froebel's ethical teaching has 
wrought its perfect work in the homes, the 
schools, and the churches, then his complete 
ideal, which is the gospel ideal in practice, 
will be the greatest controlling and uplift- 
ing force in the world." 

One word more about the relation between 
Froebel's thought and current science. 

The view of man as an active animal, a 
struggler, alive and happy only in activity, 
falls in naturally with what' we know of the 
animal kingdom. The philosophers are at 
war over science and religion, over the ori- 
gin of the non-self-regarding instincts. By 
an external consideration of the animal hier- 
archy they have come to certain conclusions 
which they strive to apply to the highest 
animal, man. There is great boggling over 
him; because these non-self-regarding in- 
stincts, which are not very apparent from the 
outside, seem to conflict with certain gen- 
eralizations relative to the conservation of 
species. The scientists look into a drop of 
water and see animals eating each other up. 
What they have not seen is that all this 
ferocity goes forward, subject to customs as 
rigid as a military code, and that it is this 
code which conserves the species. The 
"struggle for existence " as it is commonly 

I LI 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

conceived would exterminate in short order 
any species that indulged in it. 

Meanwhile Froebel, beginning at the other 
end of the scale and studying life from the 
inside, has established certain facts, certain 
laws, which have as great a weight, and de- 
serve as much to be carried downward in 
the scale, as the generalizations of the nat- 
uralists (very likely imperfect) have to be 
carried upward. 

The animal man is unselfish. It is impos- 
sible to make his organism vibrate as a unity 
except by some emotion which can be shown 
to be non-self-regarding. At what point in 
the scale of nature does this quality begin to 
manifest itself? Is the dog happy when he 
is selfish ; do the laws of psychology outlined 
by Froebel apply, and to what extent do they 
apply, to the horse or the monkey? These 
things must be patiently studied, and the 
corrections must be made. In the mean 
time, in dealing with man himself, we are 
obliged to rely upon the latest scientific re- 
port of him, however imperfect, and until 
Froebel' s laws are destroyed, we need not 
attempt to adjust our ideas of man to the 
dogmas developed by the study of the lower 
animals. 



113 



DEMOCRACY 



IV 

DEMOCRACY 

The system of choosing public officials by 
popular vote is properly enough called De- 
mocracy. The terms of tenure and nomen- 
clature, etc., are matters of detail. If we 
are to seek any test as to what constitutes a 
Democracy, we may as well take as a test 
the formal setting up at a particular time of 
some scheme of government by the popular 
will. England has been a democracy since 
the Act of Settlement, and if it be said that 
universal suffrage was not then known, the 
answer is that it is not known now, and 
never can be known. The exclusions of 
women and non-naturalized residents or even 
of criminals and lunatics are matters of con- 
venience. It is a question of degree. 

Again, it is impossible that all the officials 
should be elected, and the assignment to the 
elected officials of the power to appoint the 
others is a matter of convenience. The very 
simple expedients adopted by the framers of 
JI 5 



DEMOCRACY 

the United States Constitution were the re- 
sult of English experience and French the- 
ory. The intellect of France had, during 
the eighteenth century, put into portable 
form the ideas that had been at work in 
England's institutions. The theoretical part 
of it, the division of government into three 
departments, had been worked out from 
European experience going back to Greek 
times. The written constitution was a mere 
expansion of the Bill of Rights. Our Fram- 
ers were men who had had personal experi- 
ence in governing under the English system 
in force in the colonies, where the power of 
practical self-government had been deveL 
oped by isolation. They received from the 
French a scientific view of that system. 
They had learned by experience that a con- 
federacy was not a government, and they pro- 
ceeded to bind the country together by the 
grant of that power which defines govern- 
ment, the power to tax. The extension to a 
large territory of a system which was in prac- 
tical operation in all its parts, was in one 
sense a miracle of intelligence, in another 
sense it was the only conceivable solution of 
the problem of unity. Philosophers speak 
of Democracy as if it were the outcome of 
choice. It has been the outcome of events. 
116 



DEMOCRACY 

No other system would have endured, and 
every formula of government that did not 
embody an old usage would have been trans- 
formed in ten years by the popular will into 
something that did. 

The reason the Constitution of the United 
States is the most remarkable document in 
existence is that it contained so little of 
novelty. The election of some officers and 
the appointment of the rest, that was what 
the people were used to. That is democ- 
racy. There is of course no such thing as a 
pure democracy, or a pure monarchy. Every 
government is in practice the outcome of 
forces of which a very small fraction are 
expressed in its constitution and laws. 

A constitution is a profession of faith, a 
summary written on a bulletin board, and so 
far good. The United States had this ad- 
vantage in starting upon her career, that the 
bulletin was a very accurate summary of ex- 
isting customs, and was in itself an inspiring 
proof of the virtue of the people. We are 
driven into admiring the Colonists as among 
the most enlightened of their kind. It is 
true that the revolution was conducted, and 
the Constitution adopted by the activity of 
a small minority. But this is true of all 
revolutions. The point is that the leaders 
i*7 



DEMOCRACY 

represented sense and virtue. The people 
followed. 

The moment the scheme was launched it 
became the sport of the elements. In the 
North a trading bourgeoisie grew up under 
it. In the South a slave-holding oligarchy, 
a society so fantastically out of touch with 
the modern world that it seems like some- 
thing left over from the times before Christ, 
found no difficulty in making use of the 
forms of Democracy. During the half cen- 
tury that followed, these two societies be- 
came so hostile to each other that conflict 
was inevitable, and there ensued a death- 
grapple in four years of war, a war to ex- 
tinction. At the end of the war no trace of 
the oligarchy remained upon the face of the 
earth. And yet these forms of government 
survived and began to operate immediately, 
under new auspices of course, deflected by 
new passions, showing new shapes of distor- 
tion, yet ideally the same. The only com- 
mon element between the north and the 
south was the reverence for these forms of 
government. 

Meanwhile civilization had been creeping 
westward in a margin of frontier life, con- 
ducted under these forms. Behind this 
moved a belt of farming and village life, at 
1.18 



DEMOCRACY 

war with the backwoods ideals, but using the 
same forms of government. Then arose the 
railroad era and tore millions of money from 
the continent, heaped it in cities, obliterated 
State lines, centralized everything, con- 
trolled everything, ruled everybody — still 
under these forms. 

Let us examine them. 

The problem of government is to protect 
the individuals in a community against each 
other, and to protect them all against the 
rest of the world. The power to interfere 
and the power to represent must be lodged 
somewhere, and the question is how to ar- 
range it so that this power shall not be 
turned against the people. Democracy 
solves it by election. Let the people choose 
their rulers. Instantly every man is turned 
into a custodian, a part of him is dedicated 
to the public. He is prevented by funda- 
mental theory of law from being absolutely 
selfish. Corrupt him how you will, deflect 
him, play upon him, degrade, deceive him, 
you cannot shut him off from this influence. 
The framework of government makes con- 
tinuous appeal to the highest within him. 
It draws him as the moon draws the sea. 
This appeal is one to which the organic 
nature of man responds, as we have seen. 

JI 9 



DEMOCRACY 

For man is an unselfish animal. The law 
of his nature is expressed in the framework 
of government. The arrangement shows a 
wisdom so profound that all historical phi- 
losophy grows cheap before it. 

If you jump from the study of psychology 
straight into the theory of democracy, you 
see why it was that the allegiance to the 
ideas of the United States Constitution en- 
dured through slavery, through the carpet- 
bag era, through the Tweed ring. It was 
not the letter, but the spirit which was 
inextinguishable. 

It has taken a century of pamphlets to 
break down the distinctions between men 
based upon orders of nobility 5 property, 
creed, etc. Fifteen minutes of psychology 
would have levelled men and set them upon 
the same footing as that upon which they 
walk into a hospital. 

The creature man is by this system dealt 
with so simply as he had not been dealt with 
since the birth of Christ. It must be con- 
ceded that the thing could not even have 
been tried, except with a people familiar 
with the distinctions between legislative, 
executive, and judicial power, criminal and 
civil law, etc. Altruistic impulse would 
not have sufficed to execute itself. But the 
120 



DEMOCRACY 

divisions and forms of thought expressive of 
that altruism already existed, and were in 
operation, as we have seen. 

It is thought that the peculiar merit of 
Democracy lies in this: that it gives to 
every man a chance to pursue his own ends. 
The reverse is true. The merit lies in the 
assumption imposed upon every man that he 
shall serve his fellow men. This is by the 
law of his being his only chance for happiness. 
You cannot find a man who does not know this. 
If you examine the consciousness of any 
typical minion of success, you will find that 
his source of inward content lies in a belief 
that his success has benefited somebody — his 
kindred, his townsfolk — mankind. 

The concentration of every man on his 
own interests has been the danger and 
not the safety of Democracy; for De~ 
mocracy contemplates that every man shall 
think first of the State and next of himself. 
This is its only justification. In so far as 
it is operated by men who are thinking first 
of their own interests and then of the State, 
its operation is distorted. 

Democracy assumes perfection in human 
nature. In so far as an official or a voter is 
corrupt, you will have bad government. Or 
to put the same thing in another way, all 

121 



DEMOCRACY 

corruption is shown up as a loss of the power 
of self-government. The framework of gov- 
ernment lies there exposed in all its parts 
like a vast and complex dial, recording with 
the nicety of . a scientific instrument every 
departure from virtue of the human beings 
whose lives, whose standards, whose very 
thoughts are registered against it. When 
selfishness reaches a certain point, the ma- 
chine stops. Government by force comes 
in. We have had railroad riots and iron 
foundry riots. In Denver not many months 
ago thirty thousand people, or about one-fifth 
of the population, engaged in a carnival of 
destruction and raided a picnic given by the 
Cattle Association. These ebullitions, which 
look like mania, are nothing but an acute 
form of blind selfishness, due to the educa- 
tion of a period in which everything has 
been settled by an appeal to the self-interest 
of the individual. The Bryanism, with which 
we must all sympathize, is nothing but a re- 
volt on the part of the poorer classes against 
the exploitation of the country by the capi- 
talist, due to pension laws, tariffs, trusts, 
etc. " Something must now be done for 
me," says the laboring man, and the mine 
owner says "Silver. " The appeal is by a 
little manipulation worked up into a craze, 
122 



DEMOCRACY 

with the result that property is unsafe. The 
craze is a craze of mistaken selfishness. One 
of the weapons with which the richer classes 
fought it was corruption. They fed the ele- 
ment which was devouring them. There is 
talk of bayonets, and it is true that either 
bayonets or public spirit must in such cases 
be the issue. We cannot have property at 
the mercy of a mob, and if any single state 
like Colorado were separated from the rest, 
and the spirit of unreason should possess it 
utterly, government by force would ensue. 
Elections would be superseded, and property 
would improvise some mode of practical 
government which every intelligent man 
would back. The danger of an episode of 
this sort is that it interrupts the course of 
things. It is revolution. It is the break- 
down of democracy, and tends to perpetuate 
the conditions of incompetence out of which 
the crisis arises. Fortunately the country is 
so large that one State holds up the next. No 
community would tolerate a state of siege 
for more than six months, and the State 
would return to educational methods, weaker 
but alive. 

A military imposition of order is then the 
extreme case. But the Boss system is the 
halfway house in the breakdown of free 
J 23 



DEMOCRACY 

government. In the Boss system we have 
seen a lack of virtue in the people show 
itself in the shape of a government, in fact 
autocratic, but in form republican. Here 
again the loss in the power of self-govern- 
ment is apparent. 

But there is no departure from civic virtue 
which can get by unnoticed. Take the case 
of a voter who submits to having his street 
kept dirty because he fears that a protest 
would make him disagreeably conspicuous. 
Here also the loss of power of self-govern- 
ment is traceably recorded. So much sel- 
fishness — so much filth. 

If we now recur for a moment to the 
state of things described in the essay on poli- 
tics, we see that our government in all its 
branches has reflected the occupation and 
spiritual state of the people very perfectly. 
But outside of the recurrent and regular 
political activity of the country, there has 
grown up during the past few years a sort of 
guerilla warfare of reform. This represents 
the conservative morality of the. community, 
the instinct of right government which re- 
sents the treason to our institutions seen 
in their operation for private gain. The 
reformers' methods of work are necessarily 
democratic, and it is here that the most 
."4 



DEMOCRACY 

delicate tests of self-seeking are to be found. 
These reformers desire to increase the un- 
selfishness in the world, yet the moment 
they attempt a practical reform they are told 
that any appeal to an unselfish motive in 
politics means sure failure. They accord- 
ingly make every variety of endeavor to use 
the selfishness of some one as a lever to in- 
crease the unselfishness of somebody else. 
The thing is worked out in daylight time 
after time, year after year, and the results 
are recorded in millegrams. No obscurity 
is possible because every man stands on the 
same footing. Our minds are not obscured 
by thinking that A must be sincere because 
he is a bishop, or need not be sincere be- 
cause he is a lord. 

There is no landlord class with prejudices, 
no socialist -class with theories. There are 
no interests except money interests, and 
against money the fight is made. If a man 
is a traitor it is because he has been bought. 
The results, stated in terms of ethical theory, 
are simply startling. 

A reform movement employs a paid secre- 
tary. In so far as he gets the place because 
of his reform principles he represents an 
appeal to selfishness. This is instantly re- 
flected in his associates, it colors the move- 
125 



DEMOCRACY 

ment. He himself is attracted partly by the 
pay. By an operation as impossible to avoid 
as the law of gravity he enlists others who 
are also partially self-seeking. 

A Good Government Club is formed by 
X, and every member is called upon for dues 
and work. It thrives. Another is founded 
by Y and supported by him because of his 
belief that reform cannot support itself but 
must be subsidized. Inside of three weeks 
the existence of X's Club is threatened, be- 
cause its members hear that Y's Club is 
charitably supported and they themselves 
wish relief. They are turned from workers 
into strikers by the mere report that there 
is money somewhere. Spend $100 on the 
Club, and Tammany will be able to buy it 
when the need arises. So frightfully accu- 
rate is the record of an appeal to self-interest 
made in the course of reform, that no one 
who watches such an attempt can ever there- 
after hope to do evil that good may come. 

The system lays bare the operation of 
forces hitherto merely suspected. Democ- 
racy makes the bold cut across every man 
and divides him into a public man and a 
private man. It is a man-ometer. You 
could by means of it stand up in line every 
man in New York, grading them according 
126 



DEMOCRACY 

to the ratio of principle and self-interest in 
each. 

In England a man takes office as the pay 
for services to the government. In America 
he does the same. It is part of their system, 
part of our corruption. This may seem a 
small point, but it will work out large. An 
absolute standard is imposed. That our 
most pronounced reformers are far from un- 
derstanding their duties gives proof of the 
degradation of the times, but it exalts the 
plan of government. These men will lead 
a reform for four weeks, as a great favor, a 
great sacrifice, under protest, apologizing to 
business. They say public duties come first 
only in war time. They give, out of con- 
science and with the left hand, what remains 
after a feast for themselves. And these are 
the saints. Tell one of them that he has not 
set an honorable standard of living for his 
contemporaries unless, having his wants 
supplied, he makes public activity his first 
aim in life, and he will reply he wishes 
he could do so. He hopes later to devote 
himself to such things. He will give you 
a subscription. This man lives in a De- 
mocracy but he denies its claims. He too 
is recorded. 

The English, who gave us all we know of 
127 



DEMOCRACY 

freedom, have been the first to understand 
its meaning. They too have suffered dur- 
ing the last century from the ravages of 
plutocracy, from the disease of commerce. 
But they had behind them the intellectual 
heritage of the world. They had bulwarks 
of education, philanthropy, thought, train- 
ing, ambition, enthusiasm, the ideals of 
man. It was these things, this reservoir of 
spiritual power, that turned the tide of com- 
mercialism in England, and not as we so 
cheaply imagine her "leisure class. ,, The 
men and women who in the last ten years 
have taken hold of the Municipality of Lon- 
don, and now work like beavers in its reform, 
are not rich. Some of them may be rich, 
but the force that makes them toil comes 
neither out of riches nor out of poverty, but 
out of a discovery as to the use of life. 
These Englishmen have outlived the illusions 
of business. As towards them we are like 
children. If it were a matter of mere riches 
we have wealth enough to make their "lei- 
sure class " ridiculous. If there must be 
some term in the heaping of money before 
the energies of our better burghers are to be 
diverted toward public ends, we may wait till 
doomsday. But the reaction is of another 
sort, and is very simple. Let us be just to 
128 



DEMOCRACY 

the conscience-givers. They dare not give 
more. The American is ashamed to lose a 
dollar. He does not want the dollar half 
the time, but he will lose caste if he fore- 
goes it. Our merchant princes go on spe- 
cial commissions for rapid transit, and 
receive $5000 apiece. They must be paid. 
Out of custom they must receive pay be- 
cause " their time is valuable/' and thus the 
virtue and meaning of their office receives a 
soil: they do not work. All this is, even 
at the present moment, against the private 
instincts of many of them. It is apparent 
that they stand without, shame-faced. It 
needs only example to give them courage. 
A few more reform movements in which 
they see each other as citizens, will knock 
the shackles from their imagination and 
make men of them. And then we shall 
have reform in earnest. For with this en- 
franchisement will come their great awak- 
ening to the fact that not they only but all 
men are really unselfish. It is the obscure 
disbelief in this salvation wliich has made 
reform so hard where it might be so easy. 
As soon as the reformers shall have reformed 
themselves, they will avoid making any ap- 
peal to self-interest as so much lost time, so 
much corruption, and will walk boldly upon 
9 129 



DEMOCRACY 

the waves of idealism which will hold 
them up. 

If commerce has been our ruin, our form 
of government is our salvation. Imagine a 
hereditary aristocracy, a State church, a 
limited monarchy to have existed here dur- 
ing the last thirty years. By this time it 
would have been owned hand and foot, tied 
up and anchored in every abuse, engaged 
day and night in devising new yokes for the 
people. The interests now dominant know 
the ropes and do their best, but they cannot 
corrupt the sea. They cannot stop the con- 
tinual ferment of popular election and re- 
form candidate. The whole apparatus of 
government is a great educational machine 
which no one can stop. The power of light 
is enlisted on the side of order. A property 
qualification would have been an anchor to 
windward for the unrighteous. At the bot- 
tom of the peculiarly hopeless condition of 
Philadelphia lie the small house and lot of 
the laboring man. They can be taxed. 
They can be cajoled and conjured with. 
Corruption is entrenched. 

We find then in democracy a frame of 
government by which private selfishness, the 
bane and terror of all government, is thrust 
130 



DEMOCRACY 

brutally to the front and kept there, staring 
in hideous openness. 

Nothing except such an era as that which 
we have just come through, during which 
we have grown used to absolute self-seeking 
as the normal state of man, could so have 
glazed the eyes of men that they could not 
see thrift even in a public official as a crime, 
or self-sacrifice even in a public official ex- 
cept as a folly. And yet so sound is the 
heart of man that in spite of this corruption 
and debauchery, the American people, the 
masses of them, are the most promising 
people extant. We have a special disease. 
It is our minds which have been injured. 
We are cross-eyed with business selfishness 
and open to the heavens on all other sides. 
For this openness we must thank Democracy. 
Here are no warped beings, but sane and 
healthy creatures under a temporary spell. 
The American citizen, by escaping the super- 
stitions studded over Europe since the days 
of the Roman empire, has a directer view of 
life (when he shall open his eyes) than any 
people since the Elizabethans. He will 
have no prejudices. He will be empirical. 
But he must forswear thrift, and the calcu- 
lating of interest in his sleep. No religious 
revival will help us. We are religious 
131 



DEMOCRACY 

enough already. It is our relaxation. Only 
the painful unwinding of that intellectual 
knot into which our minds are tied, — that 
state of intense selfishness during which we 
see business advancement as our first duty, 
taught us at the cradle, enforced by example, 
inculcated like a religion, — can make us 
begin to operate our institutions upon the 
lines on which they alone can run freely, and 
we ourselves develop normally. This un- 
winding will come through a simple inspec- 
tion of our condition. Let sio one worry 
about the forms and particular measures of 
betterment. They will flow naturally from 
the public acknowledgment by the individ- 
ual of facts which he privately knows and 
has always known and always denied. 

This goes on hourly. Those people who 
do not see it, look for it in the wrong places. 
You cannot expect it to show itself in the 
public offices. They are the strongholds of 
the enemy. You cannot expect it to appear 
very often in the children of captivity, the 
upper bourgeoisie. These men are easily 
put to sleep and will take the promise of 
a politician any day as an excuse for non- 
activity. They give consent. What we 
want is assertion, and it is coming like a 
murmur from the poorer classes who desire 
132 



DEMOCRACY 

the right and who need only leadership to 
make them honest. 

It is the recurrent tragedy in reform move- 
ments that the merchants put forward some- 
thing that the laboring man instantly nails 
for a lie. It is not the loss of the election 
which does the harm, but this insult to the 
souls of men. 

Let no one expect the millennium, but let 
us play fair. We can see that our stand- 
ards, particularly among the well-to-do, are 
so low that mere inspection of them causes 
indignant protest. But we must also know 
that when we accepted democracy as our form 
of government we ranked the political edu- 
cation of the individual as more important 
than the expert administration of govern- 
ment. This last can come only as a result, 
not as a precurser of the other. 

The example of a whole people, mad with 
one passion, living under a system which 
implies the abnegation of that passion, has 
laid bare the heart of a community, has 
shown the interrelations between the organs 
and functions of a society, in a way never 
before visible in the history of the world. 
Everything is disturbed, . but everything is 
visible. We see Literature, a mere thread, 
yet betraying all things; Architecture, still 
i33 



DEMOCRACY 

submerged in commerce but showing every 
year some vital change; Social Life, the 
mere creature of abuses, like a child cov- 
ered with scars, but growing healthy; the 
Drama, a drudge to thrift every way and yet 
palpably alive. By the light of these things 
and their relation to each other we may 
view history. 

The American is a typical being. He is 
a creature of a single passion. In so far as 
Tyre was commercial she was American. 
You can reconstruct much of Venetian poli- 
tics from a town caucus. In so far as Lon- 
don is commercial it is American. You can 
trace the thing in the shape of a handbill in 
Moscow. Or to take the matter up from the 
other side : you can, by taking up these corre- 
lated ganglia of American society, which do 
nevertheless simply represent the heart of 
man, and are always present in every society 
— by imagining the enlargement of one func- 
tion, and the disuse of the next, you can 
reconstruct the Greek period and re-imagine 
Athens. 

No wonder the sociologists study America. 
It seems as if the key and cause of human 
progress might be clutched from her entrails. 



134 



GOVERNMENT 



GOVERNMENT 

When two men are fighting and agree that 
they will stop at sundown, we have govern- 
ment. Their consent is government. Their 
memory of that consent is an institution. 
There never was a government of any kind 
or for any purpose that did not rest upon the 
consent of the governed ; but the means by 
which the consent is obtained have varied. 
The consent records the extent to which the 
individuals are alike. It is only by virtue 
of similarity in the governed that govern- 
ment exists. On a ship, all men are alike in 
their danger of being drowned, and they con- 
sent to dictation from the captain for the wel- 
fare of all. The aim of the despot is to keep 
the population alike in their need of him or 
their fear of him. After the French Revolu- 
tion, the entire French people were alike 
both in their desire for order and in their lack 
of training in self-government. A dictator 
was inevitable. Gouverneur Morris, whose 
137 



GOVERNMENT 

experience in America qualified him to 
judge, saw the matter clearly as early as 
1791. Napoleon kept the people alike, by 
the two opposite means of giving them so- 
cial order and foreign war. Henry V. kept 
himself on top in England by waging war in 
France. Seward in 1861 thought to unite 
the people of the United States by declaring 
war against everybody in Europe. The Ger- 
man Emperor is sustained to-day by the pop- 
ular fear of France and Russia. It makes no 
difference what foolishness he commits; so 
long as that fear predominates he will be 
absolute. 

For the converse proposition is also true, 
that in so far as people are like-minded, they 
must be ruled by a single mind. A hun- 
dred Malays cannot establish a representa- 
tive government. They must have a boss. 
The population of Russia can only be ruled 
by a Czar. So also whenever under any form 
of government all the people want one thing, 
one man does it. The reasons for it are 
invented afterwards, and " war powers " are 
found to justify the proclamation setting the 
slaves free. 

The extent to which people are similar to 
each other will be recorded in their institu- 
tions; in fact, those institutions are nothing 

138 



GOVERNMENT 

but dials of similarity. For this reason any 
popular national institution gives you the 
nation. Moreover any ruler, any system, 
any consent has a tendency to modify the 
future because he or it is advertised and 
established. It is a factor in the conscious- 
ness of every individual. It is the conserva- 
tive. It tends to affect the conduct and 
mind of every one, for any one coming in 
contact with it must conform or resist. It 
is a challenge to the individual. It im- 
pinges upon him. The thing changes daily 
in his mind, and occupies now more, now 
less, of his activities. In cases where his 
whole external conduct has been absorbed 
by one such power we have absolute rule, 
religious or military, and a uniform popu- 
lation. If there be a single predominating 
power which has not yet completely con- 
quered, we have in some form or another a 
record of its growth by a tendency toward 
absolutism. 

The American people have been growing 
strikingly uniform, owing to their one occu- 
pation, — business, their one passion, — a 
desire for money. They are divided by their 
system of politics into two great categories, 
and hence we see the two opposing Bosses, 
little nodes of power representing this iden- 
139 



GOVERNMENT 

tity of consciousness in each of the two great 
categories of the population, Republicans 
and Democrats. If you could cut open the 
consciousness of one thousand Americans 
and examine it with a microscope, you could 
set up our government with great ease. 

Let us concede for the sake of argument 
that the full development of individual char- 
acter and intellect is the aim of life. 

Now in so far as individuals are devel- 
oped, they differ from each other. We 
ought then to be distressed by any identity 
whatever found in the heads of individuals 
examined; and greatly distressed by the 
reign of the same passion manifested in the 
one thousand American organisms. You 
would say, ' If this thing goes on, a dictator 
is absolutely certain/ and then you would 
remember that you had heard a business man 
remark at the Club the evening before, that 
he would welcome a dictator as a cheap 
practical way out of it. 

Let us now suppose you to examine one 
thousand English heads. The first thing 
you would notice would be that the number 
was not large enough to give reliable re- 
sults. Certain types would be manifest, but 
the special variations would be so striking 
as to cloud your conclusions. In all these 
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GOVERNMENT 

heads there would be spots of a density 
nowhere found in America, but the sponta- 
neous variations outside and round about 
them would be magnificent. You would 
say, "These spots represent different kinds 
of conservatism. This one is reverence 
for the church, that one for the army, a 
third for the judiciary. They represent 
prejudice, but they also represent stability, 
a stability that is the resultant of a thou- 
sand positive and various forces. These 
spots hold England together and give scope 
to free government. The world never has 
done and never can do better than this. 
These individuals are developed. The line 
of force of one man passes through one in- 
stitution, that of the next man through the 
next. No force, no passion, can make them 
all alike at any one time. They are an- 
chored by the Middle Ages. They are fluid 
and free in the present. The only hope for 
freedom in the individual lies in the exis- 
tence of different sorts of institutions." 

It is true that English society is like a 
menagerie, or rather like one of those col- 
lections of different animals, all in one cage, 
seen at the circus. Every one of these ani- 
mals is trained to regard the rights of the 
rest. Diversity is in itself a good. A col- 
141 



GOVERNMENT 

lege of Jesuits is a protection to liberty if it 
is set down in Denver. The Jesuits are not 
money-mad. It is an education for a Den- 
ver child to see a new kind of man. You 
will conclude, as some philosophers are now 
concluding, that to have free government 
you must encourage institutions — and you 
will be wrong. 

The fundamental reason why you are 
wrong is that these beneficent institutions 
are what is left of the activity of people 
who believed in them for their own sake. 
You can no more imitate one of them, or 
catch the power of one of them, than you 
can set up a king here to repel an invasion. 
You yourself believe in individualism. Go 
straight for that, and leave it to erect its 
bulwarks in what form it may. 

A multiplication of institutions then serves 
two contradictory purposes. It limits the 
individual, creates black spots of prejudice 
and unreason in him ; but on the other hand 
it encourages a free development of the in- 
dividual outside of those spots. It creates 
types, and types are mutually protective. 
This is only another way of saying that free 
government results from a segregation of the 
government into provinces, which cannot all 
be captured, at one time, by one force. 
142 



GOVERNMENT 

The highly intelligent and artificial sepa- 
ration of our government into the branches 
of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial was 
in a sense an attempt to get free government 
by the erection of independent institutions. 
But these were never strong enough to cre- 
ate types (we have hardly the type of judge 
among us) ; and certainly no attachment to 
any part, but the sacredness of the entire 
system, has preserved it. It was the senti- 
ment attaching to the single idea of a cen- 
tral government. 

It is to institutions that the consent to be 
governed is given. The consent is always 
a highly complex affair. It implies a civil- 
ization. It is qualified, limited, infinitely 
diversified, and is in every case regulated 
by historic fact. For instance, under a lim- 
ited monarchy, it is a consent to be gov- 
erned by a particular dynasty after special 
ceremonies, tempered by some priesthood, 
subject to such and such customs, — each 
and all existing in the imagination of the 
subject. For government is entirely a mat- 
ter of the imagination, and it is inconceivable 
that it should ever be anything else. The 
English have spent two centuries in impress- 
ing the imagination of India with the vision 
of English power. A violation by the gov- 
x 43 



GOVERNMENT 

ernment, no matter how strong, of the popu- 
lar imagination, an assumption of power in 
a field not yet subdued, always brings on 
riots. The Persians resented furiously the 
creation of a tobacco monopoly. The Sul- 
tan had to rescind it. The Americans threw 
the tea into the harbor. 

The forms and modes by which govern- 
ment is carried on are the record of things 
to which people have consented, and hence 
become important, become symbols so iden- 
tified with power that almost all historical 
writing deals with them as entities. The 
power of the symbols in any case varies 
inversely to the power of the people for self- 
government, that is, to the average differen- 
tiation between individuals; or to put the 
thing the other way, the extent to which a 
man will permit another to rule him de- 
pends upon his incapacity to rule himself. 

The great unifying forces have always 
been regarded as dangers to free govern- 
ment. War makes a nation a unit. It 
cannot be conducted by individualism. Re- 
ligion condenses power. That is the rea- 
son why our ancestors were so afraid of a 
State church. Commerce has generally been 
thought a blessing because commerce gives 
scope to individualism. It enriches and 
144 



GOVERNMENT 

educates. Yet commerce itself may bring 
in tyranny. Witness Venice. Commerce 
has centralized our government. Anything 
that affects everybody's mind with the same 
appeal strengthens government and makes 
for unity. A nation only exists by virtue 
of such general appeals. It is inside of and 
subordinate to this general unity of feeling 
that individualism must go on. The rulers 
of mankind are men who have got control of 
the symbols, of the institutions, which stood 
in the imagination of the people as most 
important, and who by manipulating them 
extended their range over the popular imag- 
ination. Or to put the thing a little differ- 
ently, the passions of the people are reflected 
in ever-changing institutions. The people 
seize a man and force him to do their 
bidding and rule them in such manner 
as to assuage their passions. They make a 
saint out of Lincoln, and a devil out of 
Torquemada. 

If a man seems to be a great man, and 
seems to be leading the people, it is be- 
cause he knows the people better than they 
know themselves. There was never a people 
yet that did not in this sense -govern them- 
selves, being themselves governed by the 
resultant of their dominant passions. The 
io i 4S 



GOVERNMENT 

Southern Pacific Railroad has for years 
owned the State of California as completely 
as if it had bought it from a tyrant who 
ruled over a population of slaves. It was 
done by the purchase of votes. In so far as 
virtue shall regain predominance in the 
breast of the voter and set him free, virtue 
will replace money in the voting, and set 
free the State. 

Universal suffrage is a mode and a sym- 
bol. Under certain conditions of education 
people must have it. Under others they 
cannot have it. But whether they have it 
or not, they will be ruled by their ruling 
passion, and if this renders them alike in 
character, their government will be a ty- 
ranny. If the reign of the passion be tem- 
pered, the reign of the tyrant will be 
tempered. Express the thing in terms of 
human feeling (and what else is there?) and 
universal suffrage is seen as a quantite 
negligeable. 

It is thus apparent that there is no insti- 
tution that cannot easily be made to operate 
to a contradictory end. The criminal courts 
here have been used to collect debt. There 
is no wickedness to which the enginery of 
the Christian Church has not at one time 
or another been lent. The passions of a 
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GOVERNMENT 

period run its institutions as easily as a 
stream turns any sort of a mill. To-day the 
United States Senate is a millionaires' club. 
To-morrow the Stock Exchange may become 
a church. 

Now what is an institution? 

It is a custom which receives an assent 
because it is a custom. Man has always 
been ruled by custom. The notion that 
there was a time when disputes were settled 
by fighting, and that arbitration came in as 
a matter of convenience, stands on the same 
sort of footing as Rousseau's social contract. 
It is an academic jeu cC esprit. In looking 
back over history all we see is custom, and 
farther back, still custom. All the fighting 
of savages is regulated by custom and always 
has been regulated by custom. Nay, the 
bees and the ants are ruled by custom. The 
idea of custom is the one idea that the gen- 
ius of Kipling led him to see in the jungle. 

Now what is at the bottom of all this 
regard for custom? At the bottom of cus- 
tom is non-self-regarding impulse. Man is 
both selfish and unselfish, but it makes, a 
great difference whether we regard him pri- 
marily as one thing or the other. The sci- 
entists, owing to their study of the lower 
animals, have tried to explain man on the 
i47 



GOVERNMENT 

selfish hypothesis and have made a mystery 
of him. They say "He must eat or die; 
therefore, he must be primarily egoistic." 
And they attempt to explain progress by the 
expanding of egoism to include, first the 
family, then the tribe, then the nation, and 
finally mankind. Society according to them 
is a convention of egoism, a compromise, a 
joint-stock company. Religion is a matter 
of ghosts and ancestor worship, not fully 
explained yet. Note that this whole view 
depends upon a dogma that man must be 
primarily selfish because he must eat. It is 
fair enough to retort with a paradox. Man 
absolutely selfish could not survive. Man 
absolutely unselfish would thrive splendidly. 
The individuals would support each other. 

But let us start square and remember that 
it is a question of science. Take the other 
hypothesis. The horse runs in herds and 
propagates his species because he is fond of 
the species. Incidentally he gets protected. 
It is through the illusion that he loves his 
fellows that his own welfare is secured. 
Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom, 
self-protection the result. 

It is the same with every human institu- 
tion. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the 
bottom of all regard for law. We have seen 
.148 



GOVERNMENT 

that Democracy is organized altruism, but 
there was never a government that did not 
profess to be organized altruism. You can- 
not bring men together on any other plea, 
nor hold them together by any other tie. It 
is only in so far as altruism in conduct exists 
that progress is possible. If the men will 
not stop fighting at sundown, they have no 
institutions. They perish. 

The regard that every custom receives 
from the individual who supports it is a non- 
self-regarcling emotion. From the ceremo- 
nials of savages, through the custom of the 
Frenchman who lifts his hat as a funeral 
passes, to the feeling of Kant as he con- 
templated the moral law, the element is the 
same. It is reverence. It is respect. It 
is self-surrender. 

But reverence may become intensified into 
fear. The imagination of the worshipper 
curls over like a wave. It looks back at 
him and frightens him, and when this hap- 
pens we call it Superstition. The pain of 
it, like all pain, like the distress of insan- 
ity, comes wholly from the fact that it is a 
self-regarding emotion, it is a disease. Man 
in every stage of his culture is liable to 
this disease. Want of food or tyranny, 
bad water or bad government, brings on 
149 



GOVERNMENT 

this trouble. Every country and every age 
shows forms of it : and very naturally, the 
savage who is subject by reason of hardships 
to many diseases, shows terrible forms of 
this disease of superstition. This is the 
chief fact that the scientists have seen in 
the savage. These savants, holding the 
egoism of man as their major thought, have 
through their ignorance of human nature been 
led to base their explanation of the religion 
of mankind upon a disease of the savage. ■ 

The opposite explanation stares them in 
the face. We all know in a general way 
that the New Testament civilized Europe. 
The book is a mere cryptogram of all pos- 
sible altruism, and therefore fits the soul of 
man. Give two men the New Testament , 
— and each man sees himself in it, and it 
affects each one differently. By developing 
and unfolding the character and emotions of 
each according to the law of his individual 
growth, the book differentiates them at once. 
The more unhappy a man is the more he 
needs it. Oppress a man or put him in jail, 
let him lead a life of self-indulgence, or 
isolation, and he grows quasi-religious; the 
altruistic emotion has not been expended in 
intercourse with his fellows, and it accumu- 
lates. This book then, by focussing the altru- 



GOVERNMENT 

ism in each individual of many generations 
of men, by being perpetually rediscovered, 
by existing as a constant force differentiat- 
ing individuals and so undoing the tyranny 
of institution after institution founded upon 
itself, gradually got itself enacted into in- 
ternational law, into custom, into sentiment, 
and into municipal rule, and has been on 
the whole the controlling force in Western 
Europe during the last eighteen centuries. 
Its symbols express the constant factor in 
human nature. It is only in so far as a 
book does this that it is remembered at all. 

Of course, when a custom arises it is 
turned on the instant into something that 
can be used by egoism, and here comes the 
pivot of the matter. Custom renders men 
similar to each other. The letter killeth. 
But the letter does much more than kill. 
It educates, it trains, it transmits. Hence 
the two contradictory functions of an insti- 
tution which we found at work in England, 
the one to educate, the other to limit. 

In studying the effect of institutions upon 
the individual, the whole hierarchy of nature 
must be reviewed at once. We have noth- 
ing to guide us in our study of the animals 
except our knowledge of man, but we have 
much to find in that study which will en- 

'5 1 



GOVERNMENT 

large and illustrate that knowledge. Every 
naturalist and every sociologist should receive 
his preliminary training in the political arena, 
and every politician in the greenhouse and 
the menagerie. 

Let us look at the social life of the ants. 

The ant seems to show a stage of progress 
in which the individuals have grown alike 
through a slavish observance of certain in- 
stitutions. It is certain that the ant is a 
ritualistic being, formal, narrow, intolerant, 
incapable of new ideas or private enterprise. 
He hates any one differing from himself, 
whether more or less virtuous. He would 
regard any suggested improvement in the 
arrangement of his house as a sacrilege. 
He works constantly for the public with a 
devotion that nothing but religious zeal can 
explain, and is in his own limited way com- 
pletely happy. But the tyranny of public 
opinion, the subserviency to a State church 
goes far to make him contemptible. 

This is the worst that an institution can 
do. The individual is crushed. The pri- 
meval reverence for custom seen in the ants 
has crystallized without getting developed 
and specialized into its higher form of rev- 
erence for the individual ant. He is a type 
of arrested development. 

x v 2 



GOVERNMENT 

The natural history of religion is then to 
be sought in a reverence for custom that 
gradually specializes itself into a regard for 
the individual. If these things are true, 
the advancement of any civilization may be 
measured by the extent in which the rights 
of individuals are held sacred. And this is 
what we have always been taught. 

Government was in its origin indistin- 
guishable from religion, and down to the 
latest day of time, the fluctuating institu- 
tions of man will record this kinship be- 
tween ritual and law. 

The scientists, in trying to explain reli- 
gion and progress as the result of an egoism 
gradually expanding itself to a regard for 
mankind, have been pulling at the wrong 
end of the cocoon. The thread unwound a 
bit and then broke; unwound again and 
again broke. They were puzzling them- 
selves over a conception fundamentally un- 
scientific and at war with their own first 
principles. 

The genesis of the emotions proceeds like 
other developments from the simple towards 
the complex. The notion that the egoism 
of man gradually expanded so as to include 
the whole human race in a love which was 
in reality a love of himself, assumes that 
i l S3 



GOVERNMENT 

this large love is the sum of lesser loves. 
It fixes the attention on the objects of human 
feeling, and not upon the character of the 
feeling itself. This character is the thing 
to be studied. When we contrast the reli- 
gious and social feelings of the civilized 
man with those of the savage we see the 
same specialization and complexity in the 
emotions themselves which is traceable in 
any higher development. The forms, argu- 
ments, theories, customs by which the feel- 
ing is expressed, show an ever-increasing 
refinement of sympathy. We are not ap- 
proaching a general and vague emotion built 
up out of lesser regards for particular peo- 
ple. We are approaching a stage of differ- 
entiation, of analysis, a stage of the personal 
application of that same altruism which ap- 
pears in its lower form as blind worship and 
self-abasement before some fetich. The 
utility of this emotion, in whatever stage of 
its development, is a consideration that may 
justify it to the philosopher, but which is 
not the pritnum mobile in the breast of him 
that has it. The whole history of man 
shows that progress comes in the shape of 
an increasing tender-heartedness which can 
give no lucid account of itself, because it is 
an organic process. 

*S4 



GOVERNMENT 

The learned classes are apt to approach a 
problem in its most difficult form. Out of 
travellers' tales about man in the South Sea 
Islands, the sociologist evolves a theory of 
religion. Take up a book on the natural 
history of religion and you will find enough 
learned citations about the Hurons and the 
Esquimaux and the Thibet tribes to furnish 
the library of Pantagruel. Now the regard 
of a savage for his idol is a very obscure 
question of psychology. Ten years of youth 
spent among a tribe would not be too long a 
period in which to lay the foundations for 
an intelligent guess at the facts, let alone 
their significance. 

Meanwhile, the actual genealogy of our 
own religious feelings is neglected as too 
familiar. Yet the spiritual history of that 
race which gave Europe many of its reli- 
gions, is better known than any other his- 
tory of a like antiquity. The point of view 
and feeling about life which has given us 
our own experience of religion was devel- 
oped in the Jew r . The Old Testament is 
the place in which to study the growth and 
meaning pf the only religious feeling that 
we are sure we understand. The history 
of the Jews is the history of a single over- 
powering emotion which appears in its two 
155 



GOVERNMENT 

forms, — so identical in content that you 
may often find them both in the same sen- 
tence, both in the same verse of Isaiah or 
Psalm of David, — prostration before the 
Lord of Hosts, compassion for the poor and 
the oppressed. This passion of altruism 
which gave the prophets their terrible power 
is the legacy of the jew to the world. The 
emotion of self-abasement and self-sacrifice 
and the emotion of love towards others, are 
one thing. This, in its lower forms, leads 
to self -mutilation and incantations; in its 
higher forms, it becomes embodied by the 
prophetic fury of great poets into the idea 
of a Messiah who shall be both savior and 
sacrifice. There is only one passion at work 
in all these great protagonists of human 
nature, in Nathan, Elijah, Jeremiah and in 
the innumerable prophets who confronted 
the arbitrary power of the kings. These 
men stood for righteousness and showed an 
intensity of moral courage which nothing 
but compassion has ever engendered, and 
nothing but faith has ever expressed. The 
rags and the self surrender, the purity and 
the power, the belief that they spoke not of 
themselves but for the Lord, have been the 
same in all ages. It is impossible to feel 
compassion in this degree and not express it 



GOVERNMENT 

in this manner. All just anger is compas- 
sion. The terrible wrath of these men is as 
comprehensible as their hymns or their tri- 
umph. There is no child that reads Isaiah 
whose nature does not respond to him, be- 
cause the course of feeling in him is true to 
life. Between the Old Testament and the 
New we see a perfectly coherent develop- 
ment of the same passion of the same race 
into its higher kind. Both forms of it have 
changed. In the New Testament the love 
has become specialized into that particular 
and especial regard for the soul of each 
individual man for which we have no coun- 
terpart ; and the prostration, the adoration 
for God the Father, the identification of the 
individual with God the Father, has received 
expression in forms which one can refer to 
but not describe. The kingdom of heaven 
is within you. 

That modern philanthropy which has been 
overcoming the world during the last cen- 
tury and has put a spirit of religion into 
politics, is expressed in ten thousand dog- 
mas and formulas. These things are the 
hieroglyphics of the most complex period in 
history, but they all read Love. 

The love of man for his fellows is the 
substantial content of every ideal, of every 
157 



GOVERNMENT 

reform. In so far as any political cry is val- 
uable, it represents this and nothing more. 
Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, The Dec- 
laration of Independence, Utilitarianism, 
Fourierism, Socialism, Prohibition, Chris- 
tian Science and the Salvation Army carry 
the same message ; and it is only because of 
this truth, and in spite of the fact that it is 
always wrapped up in every kind of false- 
hood, that they move the world forward. 
Take socialism. This thing is the logical 
outcome of the passion of pity at work in 
men who believe that the desire for property 
is the controlling factor in human arrange- 
ments. The selfishness of the individual 
has been assumed as a fundamental law in 
that school of thought, which has been domi- 
nating all our thought, and which we habit- 
ually accept as final. It receives support 
from a superficial view of human nature, and 
time out of mind has been the belief of shal- 
low people. But the great intellect and the 
great labor of the socialists have been un- 
able to make any impression upon the mind 
of a man. We know that their reasoning 
is foolish. It is to the heart that their ap- 
peal is made. Bellamy's book sells by the 
hundred thousand to tender-hearted people. 
It is a plea for humanity. It is Uncle 

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Tom's Cabin. The function of Socialism is 
clear. It is a religious reaction going on in 
an age which thinks in terms of money. We 
are very nearly at the end of it, because we 
are very nearly at the end of the age. Some 
people believe they hate the wealth of the 
millionaire. They denounce corporations 
and trusts, as if these things had hurt them. 
They strike at the symbol. What they 
really hate is the irresponsible rapacity 
which these things typify, and which noth- 
ing but moral forces will correct. In so far 
as people seek the cure in property-laws 
they are victims of the plague. The cure 
will come entirely from the other side; for 
as soon as the millionaires begin to exert 
and enjoy the enormous power for good 
which they possess, everybody will be glad 
they have the money. 

Socialism was useful, but as a theory it 
was fated from the beginning, because its 
prophets and saints are themselves spurred 
on by a different motive from that which 
they evoke in others. They offer us a reli- 
gion that assumes that human nature is other 
than it is, a religion not based upon self- 
sacrifice, and so not based upon an appeal to 
primary passion, a religion beseeching us to 
make other people comfortable. Now the 
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only motive which will make men labor for 
the comfort of others, is a belief that this is 
the quickest way of saving their souls. If 
souls are to be saved only through their own 
unselfish activity, then it is a lie to hold up 
property as a goal. The laboring man can 
be made happy only by the same means as 
the merchant. They must be saved together. 
The matter of the physical support of the 
individual follows in the wake of a regard 
for his soul, but never precedes it. The 
awakening of the spirit of individualism 
will bring support to the artisan by bring- 
ing in hand work. The machine work with 
which we have been content represents a 
loss of religion in the buyer proportionate 
to the selfishness of the times. No system 
based on thrift will displace it, but any 
movement based on self-sacrifice will tend 
to correct it. While socialism is worrying 
out the proof that a wise distribution of 
property will bring in virtue and happiness, 
other and directer formulations of the truth 
will have seized the spirits of men and saved 
the people. 

The balance of altruism in the people of a 
country, preserved in the form of practical 
self-control (no matter under what name), 
gives the wealth and power of the country. 
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GOVERNMENT 

Good government then consists in customs 
which differentiate people. They represent 
a permission to each man to be different 
from his neighbor. They are the record of 
what once was love, and now is law. 

Bad government consists in institutions 
which render men similar through some self- 
interest, some superstition. 

Let us take a few examples at random 
from history, and see whether everything of 
permanent value to the race is not merely 
a different form of expression for the same 
ideal. 

Napoleon is a type of selfishness. The 
focus of his almost illimitable intelligence 
fell within himself. He was so self-centred 
that he did not precipitate all the passion 
which supported him upon an idea. He did 
much, but he could not transcend the laws 
of psychology or escape the insecurity they 
dealt him out. He was a great reactionary, 
living in an age of progress, a great ego- 
ist in an age of altruism, a great criminal. 
The whole of Europe had hardly strength 
enough to shut him up. He went down fi* 
nally, and yet before he went down, he had 
stood for civilization in every country he 
touched by establishing law. He gave 
France his code and his bureaux, .things 



GOVERNMENT 

greater than his dynasty. He made use of 
the enlightenment, the expert intellect of 
France to establish order, and became a 
great educator through his institutions, his 
genius for administration. His worshippers 
are so struck with this side of his charac- 
ter that they forgive him his crimes. For 
our admiration is chained to the educator. 
Every great man is a great educator, and 
there is no greatness- but this. The great 
man represents, draws out, projects, and 
establishes the non-self-regarding part, the 
intellectual apparatus of others, and those 
who do it by the establishment of law and 
order receive their tribute as civilizers. 
The saints serve the same end. They speak 
a language different from that of the law- 
givers, yet their function is the same. The 
part a man plays in the formal government 
of his times depends on circumstance. It 
seems to be governed by the ratio of his 
altruism to that of his contemporaries. 
People will not tolerate a man who is too 
good or too bad. Had Napoleon lived in an 
age of retrogression, very likely, he would 
have died upon the throne. Had he been 
less self-seeking than he was, had he pos- 
sessed for instance the imagination of 
Washington, very likely the ^French would 
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have deposed him sooner, but in the end 
the memory of him would have educated 
France. - 

For this is the work of heroes. Where a 
leader has ideas that are more unselfish than 
those of his time, he is deposed, poisoned, 
or ridiculed, and his value as an educational 
force may be increased by any of these 
things. Socrates deliberately kept out of 
politics for many years, knowing that if he 
took part, his sense of justice would lead to 
his execution, and fearing to throw away his 
life; he finally expended it with such ability 
as to make every atom count. The scholars 
have not understood his Apology because 
tbey could not fathom the instinct of the 
agitator. It is the same with the martyrs, 
with the Quakers in Puritan New England, 
with the Anti-Slavery people. Their con- 
duct was governed by the truest understand- 
ing of ho^r to draw out and develop the 
conscience of others. The man who dies 
for his country does no more. 

Another gigantic educator was Bismarck. 
To have welded the squabbling principali- 
ties of Germany into an Empire within a 
lifetime is one of the achievements of his- 
tory. But Bismarck held the trump card. 
He had a cause to serve. His early work 
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ttiust have been his strongest; for since the 
war with France, patriotism has become the 
curse of Germany. It is caked into fanati- 
cism, and is being used by autocracy to ruin 
intellect. This is the mystical yet relent- 
less punishment for the element which was 
not patriotism but thrift in their conduct. 
The Germans must be great and unified and 
recover Alsace for their honor. But what 
did they want with the French milliards? 
They mulcted France to spare their pockets, 
and fastened upon themselves the personal 
hatred of the French peasant, which gives 
them William II. for a ruler. They looked 
upon property as power. Had they seen 
clearly that power is nothing but sentiment, 
they would have sown peace. 

One reason why Holland lost her suprem- 
acy was because she came to regard money 
as power. She grasped the symbol. For a 
decline sets in as soon as selfishness has 
reached such a point that any of these sym- 
bols are worshipped. Witness Spain, where 
the gold of Peru ruined the Spaniards by 
making them individually selfish. 

In the long run virtue and vice contend 
over national wealth, the first collecting, the 
second dissipating. Witness Cuba. Wit- 
ness Ireland. China is wrecked by private 
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GOVERNMENT 

greed. In the last analysis it is a matter of 
personal virtue. 

The magnificent intellect and self-control 
epitomized in Roman Government, took cen- 
turies to perish. Is it a wonder these people 
conquered the world ? 

The United States has been held together 
by English virtue, and there was so much of 
it in the race, that a few generations of 
money-changers could not ruin us. We 
had, not only the creed, but the beliefs of 
English liberty. The future of England 
depends upon her perception of this truth 
that power is sentiment. The Venezuela 
trouble showed her that her selfish conduct 
in 1 86 1 made her empire in 1896 insecure. 
The spread of England's empire has been 
due to a practice in dealing with the imagi- 
nation of others. Establish by force, de- 
velop by the organized altruism of good 
government, protect by display of force. 

This system will not apply here. We are 
the youngest nation and the most naif. 
We are at the mercy of wise or unwise treat- 
ment. But we can no more be fooled than 
a child. No display of force could touch 
our imagination or do more than irritate us. 
Our feelings must be directly engaged by 
means not known to diplomacy or to inter- 

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GOVERNMENT 

national law. Let England take a high 
tone. She must not only seem but be un- 
selfish towards us, and she will master the 
globe. 

There is one result from the fact that gov- 
ernment is a matter of imagination which is 
wholly satisfactory. Once set up a scheme 
of things which people approve of and it 
remains. We shall not have good, govern- 
ment in the United States till the people 
get over their personal dishonesty; but when 
we do get it, it will last without effort. It 
will be harder to destroy than the spoils 
system. Vigilance will be needed con- 
stantly, but action rarely. The mere an- 
nouncement of an abuse will correct it. 



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